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A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES 

AND 

UNDERWOODS 



OIL- 
(H9S' 



A Child's 

Garden of Verses 

AND 

Underwoods 

By 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

With Life of Robert Louis Stevenson 
by Alexander Harvey 

MEDALLION EDITION" 



New York 

Current Literature Publishing Co. 

1906 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 20 1906 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS &^ XXc„ No. 

/ t * 6* t L 

COPY B. 



,& 






■ \ 



Copyright, 1906 

BY 

CURRENT LITERATURE PUBLISHING CO. 



CONTENTS 

PART I— A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES 

PAGE 

To Alison Cunningham 5 

Bed in Summer „ . 7 

A Thought 8 

At the Sea-side 9 

Young Night Thought !o 

Whole Duty of Children .... 11 

Rain 12 

Pirate Story , 13 

Foreign Lands 15 

Windy Nights 16 

Travel 17 

Singing 19 

Looking Forward 20 

A Good Play 21 

Where Go the Boats? 22 

Auntie's Skirts 23 

The Land of Counterpane .... 24 

The Land of Nod 25 

My Shadow . . . . . . . . 26 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

System 28 

A Good Bcy 29 

Escape at Bedtime 30 

Marching Song 31 

The Cow 32 

Happy Thought 33 

The Wind 34 

Keepsake Mill 35 

Good and Bad Children ..... 37 

Foreign Children 38 

The Sun's Travels 39 

The Lamplighter 40 

My Bed is a Boat 42 

The Moon 43 

The Swing 44 

Time to Rise 45 

Looking-glass River 46 

Fairy Bread 48 

From a Railway Carriage .... 49 

Winter -Time 50 

The Hayloft 51 

Farewell to the Farm 52 

Northwest Passage 53 

I. Good-night. 

II. Shadow March. 

III. In Port. 

vi 



CONTENTS 

THE CHILD ALONE 

PAGE 

The Unseen Playmate 59 

My Ship and I 61 

My Kingdom 63 

Picture-books in Winter . . . . 65 

My Treasures 66 

Block City 68 

The Land of Story-books .... 70 

Armies in the Fire 72 

The Little Land 73 

GARDEN DAYS 

Night and Day 79 

Nest Eggs 81 

The Flowers 83 

Summer Sun 84 

The Dumb Soldier 85 

Autumn Fires 87 

The Gardener 88 

Historical Associations 89 

ENVOYS 

To Willie and Henrietta ... 93. 

To My Mother 94 

To Auntie 95 

To Minnie 96 

To My Name-child 99 

To Any Reader 101 

vii 



CONTENTS 

PART II — UNDERWOODS 

BOOK I — In English 

I Envoy page 

Go, little book 15 

II A Song of the Road 

The gauger walked .... 16 

III The Canoe Speaks 

On the great streams ... 18 

IV It is the Season 20 

V The House Beautiful 

A naked house, a naked moor . 22 

VI A Visit from the Sea 

Far from the loud sea beaches . 24 

VII To a Gardener 

Friend, in my mountain-side 
demesne 26 

VIII To Minnie 

A picture-frame for you to fill . 28 

IX To K. De M. 

A lover of the moorland bare . 29 



CONTENTS 



X To N. V. De G. S. 

The unfathomable sea . . 31 
XI To Will. H. Low 

Youth now flees .... 33 
XII To Mrs. Will. H. Low 

Even in the bluest noonday of 
July ....... 35 

XIII ToH. F.Brown 

I sit and wait 37 

XIV To Andrew Lang 

Dear Andrew 39 

XV Et Tu In Arcadia Vixisti 

In ancient tales, O friend . . 41 

XVI To W. E. Henley 

The Year runs through her 
phases 46 

XVII Henry James 

Who comes to-night ... 48 

XVIII The Mirror Speaks 

Where the bells ... 49 

XIX Katharine 

We see you as we see a face . 5 1 

XX To F. J. S. 

I read, dear friend ... 52 

XXI Requiem 

Under the wide and starry sky 53 

XXII The Celestial Surgeon 

If I have faltered .... 54 



CONTENTS 



XXIII 


Our Lady of the Snows 


PAGE 




Out of the sun .... 


55 


XXIV 


Not yet, my soul .... 


59 


XXV 


It is not yours, O mother, to 






complain ..... 


62 


XXVI 


The Sick Child 

O mother, lay your hand on 






my brow .... 


65 


XXVII 


In Memoriam F. A. S. 






Yet, stricken heart 


67 


XXVIII 


To My Father 

Peace and her huge inva- 






sion ...... 


69 


XXIX 


In the States 






With half a heart . 


7' 


XXX 


A Portrait 






I am a kind of farthing dip 


72 


XXXI 


Sing clearlier, Muse . 


74 


XXXII 


A Camp 






The bed was made 


75 


XXXIII 


The Country of the Cami- 

SARDS 

We travelled in the print of 






olden wars .... 


76 


XXXIV 


Skerryvore 






For love of lovely words . 


77 


XXXV 


Skerryvore: The Parallel 






Here all is sunny . 


78 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XXXVI My house, I say ... . 79 

XXXVII My body which my dungeon is 80 
XXXVIII Say not of me that weakly I 

declined ..... 82 

BOOK II — In Scots 

I The Maker to Posterity 
Far 'yont amang the years 
to be ..... . 85 

II Ille Terrarum 

Frae nirly, nippin', Eas'- 
lan' breeze .... 88 

III When aince Aprile has fairly 

come 92 

IV A Mile an' a Bittock . . 94 
V A Lowden Sabbath morn 

The clinkum-clank o' Sab- 
bath bells .... 96 
VI The Spaewife 

O, I wad like to ken . . 103 
VII The Blast— 1875 

It's rainin'. Weet's the 
gairden sod . . . . 105 
VIII The Counterblast — 1886 
My bonny man, the warld, 

it's true 107 

IX The Counterblast Ironical 
It's strange that God should 
fash to frame . . . . 1 1 1 



CONTENTS 

X Their Laureate to an Acad- page 
emy Class Dinner Club 
Dear Thamson class, whaure'er 

I gang 113 

XI Embro Hie Kirk 

The Lord Himsel' in former days 1 16 
XII The Scotsman's Return from 
Abroad 
In mony a foreign pairt I've been 1 19 

XIII Late in the nicht 124 

XIV My Conscience! 

Of a' the ills that flesh can fear . 128 
XV To Doctor John Brown 

By Lyne and Tyne, by Thames 

and Tees 130 

XVI It's an overcome sooth for age 

an' youth 134 



LIFE OF 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



"Like Scott in his ardent and impressionable youth, 
he was all unconsciously storing up the materials for 
his fictions." — Edinburgh Review. 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 
prodigally gifted in all that relates 
to tale-writing pure and simple, an 
essayist of such perfection that perhaps only 
Lamb is his peer, and a poet who has stirred 
the sensibilities of the Anglo-Saxon race on 
their most human side, lived less than forty- 
five years. He was bom in Edinburgh on the 
thirteenth of November in the year 1850, 
and he died near Apia, in the Samoan Is- 
lands, on the third of December, 1894. Had 
Scott passed away at Stevenson's age, as 
has been pointed out by Dr. Copeland, of 
Harvard, English literature would have 
been left without the Waverley novels. Had 
Dickens died so young, "A Tale of Two 
Cities" would not have been written. Ste- 
venson at forty-four was as promising as 
Chatterton at eighteen, and his literary 
career may be said properly to have begun, 
according to Stevenson's most sympathetic 



interpreter, only fourteen years before it 
ended. 

The unostentatious little stone house on 
Howard Place, Edinburgh, of which contem- 
porary guide-books make so much as " the 
birthplace of the creator of Jekyll and Hyde," 
undoubtedly planted in the child's system 
the seeds of that organic malady to which 
his untimely taking off in the maturity of 
his powers is traceable. For the first year 
of his life, indeed, as we learn from his auth- 
orised biographer and from his mother's pre- 
cious diary, the baby seemed healthy. He 
climbed eighteen steps of the stairs when 
nine months old. He walked eight weeks 
later. He was calling people by their names 
before the average baby has cut eight teeth. 
But this precocity went with a weakness of 
the chest and a susceptibility to cold inherited 
from a sprightly, girlish mother who thus 
conditioned, on its physical side, the most 
personal genius in our literature. He ac- 
ceded to his heritage of pallor and inflam- 
mation at the age of two, when the suffo- 
cation of an attack of croup seemed at one 
time to have carried him off altogether. It 
was at this crisis that " Cummie " came into 
his life in earnest — " Cummie," the nurse, 
immortalised in the verse and the prose of 



" R. L. S." His recollections of the endless 
hours when he was kept awake by coughing 
were brightened years afterward by the 
thought of the tenderness of his nurse. She 
was more patient, he tells us, than an angel 
— hours together would she encourage and 
sustain him. Many a restless night ended 
only with the coming of the files of farmers* 
carts, and the clamour of drivers, whips and 
steeds under the window. 

The delicate child was nearly three when 
the family moved on his account to a roomier 
dwelling on the other side of the road. Here, 
to his father and his mother and his nurse 
he grew into a wonderful child of seven ; but 
in his later years he fancied that he gathered 
all this time material for those essays upon 
which, as Mr. Richard Le Gallienne thinks, 
his final fame must rest. Within the three 
outside walls of his second home — soon to 
prove too cold for the frail child — he ac- 
quired an extreme terror of Hell. It was 
implanted by that faithful nurse to whom 
cards were the devices of Satan and who 
taught him to pray fervently that his father 
and mother might not be damned for play- 
ing whist. All this time the boy's health 
was going from bad to worse. He would be 
kept indoors for a whole winter, saturating 



his mind with the Bible and the shorter 
catechism and the writings of Presbyterian 
divines. By way of relaxation he made him- 
self little pulpits with chair and stool, sitting 
therein to read a service and standing up at 
proper intervals to give out a hymn. 

" You can never be good," he observed 
at the age of four, " unless you pray." 

His mother asked him how he knew. 

" Because," he replied, " I've tried it." 

His literary ambitions defined themselves 
when he was six. An uncle had offered a 
prize for the best history of Moses. Robert 
Louis Stevenson never had brother or sister, 
but his cousins were always legion. All com- 
peted, and little Louis submitted a version 
with the rest. It was dictated to his mother 
during five consecutive Sabbath nights, and 
won for him a Bible picture-book. From 
that time forward, asserts his mother, it be- 
came the heart's desire of Robert Louis 
Stevenson to be an author. 

It looked then as if he might never become 
even a man. The first attack of croup had 
left his system defenceless against succeeding 
invasions of gastric fever, chills, pneumonia, 
and bronchitis. Many and longer nights the 
child spent awake, racked with the hacking 
cough that never would let go of his body. 



It seemed to him in after years that he must 
have perished at this period if he had been 
deserted in his little crib to cough his vitality 
away. But the sleepless nurse — who would 
not accept, we are told, a proposal of mar- 
riage because it entailed a parting from her 
boy — was ever at hand to lift the sufferer 
from his bed, to bear him in the darkness 
towards the window, to point out a light here 
and there in some other window, to surmise 
that other suffering little lads were looking 
for the break of day. And when little sallies 
of delirium brought him out of fevered sleep, 
there was the father, too, sitting by the bed- 
side until slumber had come again. 

Louis was seven when the Stevensons tried 
once more to fly from his disease. They 
simply took it with them as inevitably as the 
family Bible. Koch's discovery of the tu- 
bercle bacillus was still in the future. 
The Stevensons had never heard of phthisis 
as a bedroom disease. So Louis was taken 
to live in the grey stone house at 17 Heriot 
Row — an abode solidly Scotch in the thick- 
ness of its walls. Here, behind closed doors 
and windows, the child sweltered anew in 
his own perspiration, sheltered as before 
from the air and the cold in fresh exile from 
the streets of winter. Bacteriology had still 



to proclaim that tubercular particles ejected 
from an invaded organism like his into even 
so healthy an abode as 1 7 Heriot Row must, 
unless at once devitalised, dry artificially. 
In that stage of culture they distributed 
themselves for further invasion of the organ- 
ism cooped up behind the back windows that 
looked across Queen Street gardens. " I 
principally connect these nights," he wrote 
in after years of the hacking, exhausting 
cough now as much a part of the history of 
literature as Carlyle's dyspepsia or Milton's 
blindness — "I principally connect these 
nights with our third house, in Heriot Row." 
Thus, for some score of years, more or less, 
Robert Louis Stevenson grew to manhood 
in an atmosphere as bacterial as it was 
Calvinistic. 



II 

" Even at sixteen the boy who, in the fulness of 
his powers, was to write the marvellous description of 
the ' Merry Men of Aros,' had begun to learn his 
trade." — S. R. Crockett. 



IT was the dream of the elder Stevenson's 
life to be spared long enough to see his 
only son a celebrated engineer. It was 
a perfectly natural ambition in the circum- 
stances. The family of Stevenson is asso- 
ciated as intimately with the history of light- 
houses as is the family of M'Cormick with 
the invention and exploitation of the 
reaper. A certain friend of " R. L. S." 
happened to visit the Spanish main once 
upon a time. He was asked by a Peruvian 
if he " knew Mr. Stevenson, the author " 
whose works were so esteemed in Peru. 
The friend of " R. L. S." assumed the refer- 
ence to be to the author of " Jekyll and 
Hyde." But the Peruvian had never heard 
of that firm. He was thinking only of a 
particular member of the illustrious house of 
engineers to which science is so indebted for 
an authoritative account of the principle 



upon which the Bell Rock Lighthouse is 
constructed. 

Had Robert Louis Stevenson — to whom 
this Peruvian anecdote was a perennial joy 
— been wedded to the theory of adaptation 
to environment by natural selection he could 
not, as a lad, have shown more docility in 
charging his mind with the lore of the heredi- 
tary calling. To his latest day, in truth, he 
took a pride in the family lighthouses, while 
for many a year it seemed that the family 
position as head of the Stevenson firm and 
as engineer to the Commissioners of North- 
ern Lighthouses must come to him as a 
matter of course. From the lips of his father, 
Thomas Stevenson, the celebrated expert in 
optics as applied to lighthouse illumination, 
he learned of the still more famous Robert 
Stevenson, his grandfather, immortalised by 
the Bell Rock Lighthouse on the Inchcape 
rock. Scarcely less renowned — perhaps 
more famous still, indeed — is the Skerry- 
vore lighthouse in Argyleshire, built by the 
uncle of " R. L. S." with the cooperation of 
the father of the same. " The noblest of 
all extant deep-sea lights " is Skerryvore, 
says the Stevenson who, although he fore- 
swore the hereditary line of the family glory 
for one more shining still, exulted to his 



latest day in the Inchcape beacon and the 
tower of Skerryvore. His most impression- 
able years were much filled with study of his 
father's scientific volumes and inventions. 
Thus, he tells us, it was as a harbour engineer 
that his father became interested in the 
propagation and reduction of waves — "a 
difficult subject," admits " R. L. S." in the 
paper he penned upon it. 

Difficult it must have been to Louis — 
now grown too large for the chilhood name 
of " Smout " — but he applied himself dili- 
gently to holophotal lights and louvre- 
boarded screens for optical instruments. So 
great was the paternal influence ! Not that 
Thomas Stevenson was harshly dominant. 
He simply possessed, as " R. L. S." possessed, 
a personality. This father of his is lovingly 
described by the son as a man of " somewhat 
antique strain," as a blend of sternness and 
softness, essentially melancholy by disposi- 
tion yet humourously genial in society. He 
delighted in sunflowers before Oscar Wilde 
was heard of, he showed excellent taste in 
collecting old furniture and he never grew 
weary of " Guy Mannering." Loyal to the 
Church of Scotland, morbidly conscious of 
personal unworthiness in God's sight, keenly 
studious of every branch of natural science, 



a Tory in politics, favouring the divorce of 
any woman who wanted one while denying 
a right of separation to the husband on any 
ground whatever, Thomas Stevenson lav- 
ished every gift upon his son — except un- 
limited spending- money — and kept him 
perpetually edified upon the subject of 
lighthouses. 

Chills and colds, meanwhile, interfered 
not only with the son's growth but with his 
education. When he was seven, Robert 
Louis Stevenson saw the inside of a real 
school for the first time. It was an unam- 
bitious but select temple of learning for the 
little, not very far from the child's home. 
But every draught of cold air, each wetting 
of his feet, any breathing of foggy atmos- 
phere seems to have developed an ailment 
of some respiratory passage. These " colds " 
set up every conceivable infectious malady of 
childhood in addition to whooping-cough, 
influenza, measles, and the quinsy. His 
mother, who so early in her wedded life be- 
came intimately acquainted with blisters and 
counter-irritants, poultices and fomenta- 
tions, immured her son for another winter 
or two in Heriot Row. In the summer 
months he seems to have kept tolerably well. 
But he was then usually out in the fresh air 



where lived his grandfather — not the great 
Robert Stevenson, of the lighthouses, but 
Dr. Lewis Balfour, parish minister at Colin- 
ton. The mother of Louis was a Balfour, 
and every man who has read his " R. L S." 
knows what remarkable people these Bal- 
fours were. No less than forty Balfours, 
all born and reared in or near Edinburgh, 
were first cousins to Robert Louis Steven- 
son. Most of them were frequent visitors 
in the home of the clergyman grandfather, 
who was, none the less, according to the 
most illustrious of all his grandchildren, 
" pretty stiff." Little Louis was well into 
his " Arabian Nights " once when this old 
gentleman stole up behind him. Louis 
" grew blind " with dread. But the old 
gentleman did not ban the book. He only 
said he envied Louis. 

Louis must, indeed, have been astonished. 
So firmly was the family face set against cer- 
tain forms of imaginative recreation that even 
Louis's nurse read CasselVs Family Paper 
aloud to him with a consciousness of sin. 
Cummie would ease her uneasy conscience 
with the assurance to Robert Louis that the 
publication in question contained no novels. 
They were only tales — family tales. The 
little boy himself was still so very much 



afraid of Hell, and Cummie, taught by dis- 
concerting experience, was so apprehensive 
that what began as an innocent tale would 
develop into a real novel, that CasseWs Fam- 
ily Paper — "with my pious approval," 
added R. L. S. himself in maturer years — 
was dropped forthwith. But on the follow- 
ing Saturday the little boy and his nurse were 
likely to wander in the direction of the news- 
man's shop. The pair were then wont " to 
fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their 
legends " from the open sheets of CasseWs 
exposed for sale, the ensuing instalments of 
these sinful serials. 

Constant anxiety for the health of her 
only child began in time to tell upon the 
health of the mother. Mrs. Thomas Steven- 
son had been a Miss Margaret Isabella Bal- 
four. She retained to her latest day traces 
of the beauty of feature, the grace of move- 
ment, and the sprightliness of disposition 
which enabled her to produce lasting im- 
pressions of charm upon even perfect 
strangers. Her famous son's resolute re- 
fusal through life to see the unpleasant side 
of things, his willingness to be pleased on 
every occasion, his fresh interest in any new 
experience, were part of a maternal inherit- 
ance. So devoted was the mother to the 



son that she saved practically every scrap 
of writing he ever sent her, she well-nigh 
mastered a whole branch of therapeutics in 
the meticulous care she took in nursing him, 
while the nature and the details of his innu- 
merable lapses from health in childhood are 
set down in the diaries she commenced when 
he was a year old. His progress in the alpha- 
bet, the lines he recited at the age of three 
and the domestic crisis precipitated by his 
first and only meal of buttercups are re- 
corded with a biographer's insight by the 
worshipping young mother. What a sensa- 
tion when Mr. Swan came to dinner, for 
example, and Louis, just thirty-six months 
old, recited : " On Linden when the sun 
was low ! " waving his hand and making a 
splendid bow at the end. And no doubt, ac- 
cording to Mr. Graham Balfour, the trick 
of gesture, partly inherited from the father, 
which accompanied the conversation of 
Robert Louis Stevenson through life, " re- 
ceived some of its emphasis " from the elo- 
cutionary precocity of the babe. It was 
Cummie's teaching, conceded the mother 
in her diary. Robert Louis Stevenson al- 
ways insisted, too, that his dramatic instinct 
was developed by his nurse. 

" It's you that gave me a passion for the 



drama, Cummie," he declared to her before 
a room full of people. 

" Me, Master Lou ! " she exclaimed. " I 
never put foot inside a playhouse in my 
life." 

" Ay, woman," retorted he, " but it was 
the grand dramatic way ye had of reciting." 

Even the hymns received the benefit of 
these elocutionary powers. As for the things 
she read aloud to her boy, the real mother, 
who read with all the expression of a young 
lady whose education had been fashionable, 
could never make " The Cameronian 
Dream " a reality, as Cummie could. The 
fourteen stanzas of this north country classic 
first thrilled the mind of Robert Louis Steven- 
son into unison with the romantic spirit. So 
he has told the world himself, adding that in 
this and other ways his nurse not only dic- 
tated his choice of subjects in his famous 
days, but exercised a decided if not deciding 
influence upon the evolution of his literary 
style. 

The boy waxed large. Time came when, 
in addition to the works of science in that 
austere nook, his father's library, he gained 
access to fields and fresh air in a " garden 
cut into provinces," bounded by flower- pots 
and laurels and warm sunshine and over- 



hanging woods. He had now the run of 
Colinton Manse, abode of his Balfour grand- 
father with the beautiful face and silver hair. 
Here the weak-lunged Louis led the physio- 
logical life. Perpetual irritation of his 
mucous membranes by interminable in- 
hale. Jons of cigarette smoke had not yet 
begun. The characteristic flatness of chest 
which accompanied his other Balfour in- 
heritances was eased with oxygen copiously 
breathed into healthier tissue that set up in 
turn a better balanced metabolism. " Out 
of my reminiscences of life in that dear 
place," he wrote in subsequent years, " I 
can recall nothing but sunshiny weather." 
The painful and the morbid were no more 
for a time. But he often wondered what he 
had inherited from that old minister. He 
had never been made aware, seemingly, of 
that peculiarity in the chemistry of the body 
which renders successive members of one 
family a readier prey to the tubercle bacillus 
than the members of others. In body, about 
this time or not long after, he was, as an 
observer phrases it, " badly set up." Long, 
lean and spidery arms and legs, sunken chest, 
eyes so far apart as to suggest a cast, and 
movements sluggish except in play — he 
was ugly. The oval of the brow, the soft 



brown eyes, the smile haunting the thick 
lips and the lankness of cheek combined 
to form the typically tuberculous counte- 
nance. 

His own health and that of his mother 
led to a first-hand acquaintance with the 
continent of Europe that began when Louis 
entered his teens and became very intimate 
before many years. His haphazard schooling 
and his desultory travel gave him an ulti- 
mate mastery of French, familiarity with 
German, much Latin, no particular Greek 
and an unorganised intellectual ferment in 
his brain of all that he had read and dreamed. 
With this material he began to build a style, 
taking for foundation the English of the 
Covenanting writers read to him by Cummie. 
His interest in his father's lighthouses went 
with a firmer determination than ever to be 
an author. Hot upon the history of Moses 
had come his history of Joseph produced 
without collaborators at the age of seven. 
Then appeared a small book of travels in 
the handwriting of his mother, to whom he 
dictated the work. He was thirteen when he 
completed a description of the inhabitants 
of Peebles and when he was fourteen he 
could rhyme. So says his official biographer, 
who refers us to the libretto of an opera en- 



titled " The Baneful Potato," never in print. 
At his last school and in his home circle he 
was always starting magazines of the illus- 
trated monthly variety, devoted to fiction, 
poetry, ethics and the leading events of hu- 
man history from the creation to date. He 
was now on the highroad to fiction, which 
took the form of a historical romance based 
upon that classical event in Covenanting 
annals, the Pentland rising of the seventeenth 
century. 

The parental Stevenson began at this 
point to divert his attention from the lumi- 
nous field of his parabolic reflectors to those 
sterile regions of fancy and imagination in 
which his child was running riot. He as- 
sured his son that in " making a story " of 
the Pentland rising he had spoiled a good 
thing. Louis, now shooting up into a youth 
of sixteen, was so much under the spell of 
the paternal personality, that he set about 
the transformation of his romance into a 
history. Such submission did much to re- 
store the confidence of father in son, for the 
latter had begun to be pointed out in the 
enormous Balfour- Stevenson circle as " the 
pattern of an idler." And yet, to speak in 
the very words of Robert Louis Stevenson 
in after years, he was all this time busy with 



his own private project, which was to learn 
to write. He kept two books always in his 
pocket. One he read. The other he wrote 
in. Whithersoever he went his mind was 
busy fitting what he saw with appropriate 
words. If he sat by the roadside, it was 
either to read or to note down with pencil 
the aspects of nature before him or to rescue 
from forgetfulness what he is pleased to 
term " some halting stanzas." 

Thus, to plagiarise his essays still, he 
lived with words; and what he thus wrote 
was for no ulterior use. It was written con- 
sciously for practice. It was not so much 
that he wished to be an author — though 
he wished that, too — as that he had 
vowed he would learn to write. " That 
was a proficiency that tempted me; and I 
practised to acquire it, as men learn to 
whittle, in a wager with myself." Descrip- 
tion was the form assumed by this literary 
travail mainly. " To any one with senses, 
there is always something worth describing 
and town and country are but one continuous 
subject." But he worked in other ways as 
well. Often he accompanied his walks with 
dramatic dialogues in which he, like man, 
played many parts. He would even set down 
conversation from memorv. Sometimes he 



would strive to keep a diary, but he always 
found it a thing of posturing and of melan- 
choly self-deception and he always and very 
speedily discarded the thing. Whether or 
not, in maturer years, he followed the ex- 
ample of Anthony Trollope in burning with 
many blushes the diaries of these puppy 
periods, the Stevenson estimate of this 
branch of literary art has its significance to 
the student of Pepys. 

All this, however, he tells us, was not the 
most efficient part of his training. It was 
good for him, of course ; but he thought in 
maturer years that it taught him only the 
" lower and less intellectual elements " of 
the art he mastered by these means. He 
learned the choice of " the essential note " 
and the " right word," but, regarded as 
training, it all had one serious lack — it set 
him no standard of achievement. In his 
secret labours at home — they had to be 
secret because of the peculiar environment 
— he found, however, infinite profit though 
infinite labour. Did he read a book or a 
passage that thrilled him with its style, down 
he must sit immediately and set himself to 
ape that quality. He says he was unsuc- 
cessful, yet he strove once more. Again 
unsuccessful, he records, always unsuccessful, 



he will have us believe. He got some practice 
in construction of sentence and in coor- 
dination of passages, some mastery of rhythm 
and of harmony, yet were these but " vain 
bouts " to which he returned like some 
village Hampden. " I have thus played the 
sedulous ape," he avers, " to Hazlitt, to 
Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas 
Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne." He did 
not even shrink from Montaigne or Baude- 
laire or Obermann. " Monkey tricks " he 
designates the resultant fragments of prose 
and versification, " gouty footed lyrics." 
But he was so very young ! Even at the age 
of thirteen he had essayed impressionist 
sketches of the dwellers in Peebles in the 
style of " The Book of Snobs." With that 
classic he had fallen in love almost as soon 
as he could spell. It had burst upon him 
suddenly in four old bound volumes of 
" London Punch " encountered — of all 
spots on earth — in his father's library, 
among reports of learned societies and vol- 
umes on polemic divinity. Great was the 
surprise of Robert Louis Stevenson when he 
discovered in after years that the Snob papers 
were as famous as the man who wrote them. 
They had been published anonymously in 
the London paper and to the delighted little 



Louis they were necessarily the works of 
" Mr. Punch." 

To Thomas Stevenson, immersed in the 
subject of wave propagation and reduction 
and prone to perusal of " The Parent's 
Assistant," his only son's industry over an 
epic in imitation of Browning's " Sordello " 
or a tragedy in the Elizabethan style was a 
matter of dubiety. This growing absorption 
in style as an instrument of many strings 
keyed to the scale of tragedy or comedy as 
the humour of Master Lou dictated from idle 
day to idle day was manifestly inadequate 
training. The youth's light was not to shine 
athwart the shoreless ocean of his country's 
literature, but to cast its blaze upon the boil- 
ing eddies and warn ships from the rock, 
the shallow, and the sand-bank. However, 
as Mr. Graham Balfour reflects in his biog- 
raphy of his gifted kinsman, the family 
capacity for its traditional work, though un- 
deniable, was " very elusive." It evinced 
itself mainly as " a sort of instinct for deal- 
ing with the forces of nature," never 
being manifested with inerrancy until "called 
forth in actual practice." Thus the elder 
Stevenson evidently reasoned, consoling 
himself the more readily inasmuch as the 
time was at hand for Robert Louis Ste- 



venson to see something of the practical 
side of engineering and to work for his 
science degree at the University of Edin- 
burgh. 



Ill 

" It was part of his genius that he never seemed to 
be cramped like the rest of us at any given time of 
life, within the limits of his proper age, but to be 
child, boy, young man and old man at all times." — 
Sidney Colvin. 

IN the days that followed this seventeen- 
year-old youth's entrance upon a uni- 
versity career he seemed to have put 
aside his ill health — possibly because his 
college life had little of restraint and, as he 
phrased it years later, " nothing of necessary 
gentility." The crowded class-rooms, the 
gaunt quadrangle, the bell hourly booming 
over the traffic of the city, the first muster 
of his college class and the sight of so many 
lads, " fresh from the heather," hanging 
round the stove in " cloddish embarrass- 
ment," afraid, withal, of the noise of their 
own breaking voices, made upon Robert 
Louis Stevenson those ineffaceable impres- 
sions which impart to all his essays their 
masterly autobiographical ring. The de- 
lightful sight of all classes rubbing elbows on 
the same greasy benches, of " the raffish 



young gentleman in gloves " measuring 
scholarship with " the plain clownish laddie 
from the parish school," so appealed to the 
democracy of his being as to be adopted, to 
use one of his own expressions again, into 
the very bosom of his mind. Now he could 
devise that extensive and, as he proudly 
proclaims it, that " highly rational " system 
of truantry which cost him such a deal of 
trouble to apply practically. It was in this 
capacity of chronic truant that Stevenson 
concentrated upon himself the fixed atten- 
tion of Fleeming Jenkin. Old Professor 
Blackie, the most prodigious Greek scholar 
of his time, had already good reason to re- 
mark — as he did when the truant unblush- 
ingly asked him for a certificate of attend- 
ance — that the countenance of Robert 
Louis Stevenson was very unfamiliar. But 
Fleeming Jenkin, who had come to Edin- 
burgh as Professor of Engineering when 
Stevenson's system of truancy was function- 
ing with the nicety of a parabolic reflector, 
was no professor to be fobbed off. He sub- 
dued the rebel by the process of fascinating 
him. The professor was fifteen years older 
than the student, but there was about him 
a " perpetual boyishness " and an insight 
into just such a temperament as that of 

xl 



Stevenson which made them instant com- 
rades. Fleeming Jenkin was meat and drink 
to his pupil, confesses that pupil himself, for 
many a long evening. 

Now, too, commenced his explorations of 
the Advocates' Library, the great Edin- 
burgh temple of books. Whitman's " Leaves 
of Grass " tumbled the world upside down 
for him at about this period, he has said. It 
blew into space " a thousand cobwebs of 
genteel and ethical illusion," yet, as he would 
fain believe, set him back again upon a 
strong foundation of all the original and 
manly virtues. Hard upon this discovery of 
Whitman came that of Herbert Spencer. 
But the greatest find of all was the New 
Testament and in particular the gospel ac- 
cording to Matthew. It startled and it 
moved him because he made a certain effort 
of imagination and " read it freshly like a 
book " and not " droningly and dully " like a 
portion of the Bible at home. But in charg- 
ing his mind with Montaigne, Horace, 
Pepys, Shakespeare, and the rest he accu- 
mulated that golden material for talk in 
which his pride was always honest. For 
Robert Louis Stevenson talked brilliantly 
from boyhood and frankly avowed a con- 
sciousness of it. His vibrating voice, his 

xli 



leanness, his brown skin, long hair, great 
dark eyes, brilliant smile, gentle, deprecat- 
ing bend of the head, and his trick of keeping 
a hand to his hip were blended into a vivid 
composite impression of a boy of eighteen, 
who talked as Charles Lamb wrote, or a 
" young Heine with the Scottish accent," 
as the wife of Fleeming Jenkin says. 

Yet was he not to be " drunken with pride 
and hope " until he happened to sit one 
December morning in the library of the 
Speculative. The Speculative Society, ob- 
served this prince of autobiographers in the 
maturity of his powers, is a body of some 
antiquity. It has its rooms in the very build- 
ings of the University of Edinburgh, and it 
has counted among its members Robert 
Emmett, Benjamin Constant, Jeffrey, 
Brougham, and the great Sir Walter. 
" Here," writes our incorrigible truant, " a 
member can warm himself." He can " loaf 
and read " and, in defiance of all the pow- 
ers, he can smoke. Behold, accordingly, a 
Heine with a Scottish accent, a youth who 
talked as Lamb wrote, loafing in the library 
of the Speculative and proud of the pipe he 
anarchically smoked. Three very distin- 
guished students talked animatedly in the 
next room. When they had called Robert 

xlii 



Louis Stevenson in to them and made him 
a sharer in their design to found a univer- 
sity magazine, he walked on air. 

The magazine emerged, yellow covered, 
the maiden number edited by the four of 
them in vortices of energy. The ensuing 
issue saw the editorial staff reduced to two, 
while the third number was fathered by 
Robert Louis Stevenson alone. The fourth 
and last edition — at which the enterprise 
perished — led to an embarrassing inter- 
view with Mr. Thomas Stevenson, unwill- 
ingly but helplessly induced to make an 
outrageous remittance to the printer. It 
was " a grim fiasco," and while the youth 
had known beforehand that the magazine 
would not be worth reading, and that even 
if it were nobody would read it, its fate sub- 
dued him. He told himself that the time 
was not yet ripe nor the man ready for liter- 
ary fame and he returned to his sedulous 
aping of Hazlitt and the rest in manuscripts 
withheld from the world. 

His most dexterous evasions of the physi- 
cal sciences were meanwhile baffled by the 
gentle suasion of Professor Fleeming Jenkin. 
Robert Louis Stevenson could accumulate 
no Greek, but he applied himself to statics 
and dynamics bravely. " The spinning of 

xliii 



a top is a case of kinetic stability," say his 
notes of the professor's lectures, and he had 
actually prepared jottings for a paper on a 
new form of intermittent light. He failed 
wretchedly on such distinctions as that be- 
tween the inflammable air obtained by the 
action of acids on metals and that formed 
by the destructive distillation of organic 
substances. Yet his paper on the thermal 
influence of forests was listened to by the 
members of a learned society in Edinburgh 
and even printed in a fat and heavy annual 
report. The young man's father, fortu- 
nately for his peace of mind, set no store by 
abstract science. He was all for the prac- 
tical side of lighthouse building, and accord- 
ingly fell into the habit of taking his son to 
assist him in the supervision of harbour 
works. " I can't look at it practically, how- 
ever," Louis wrote to his mother. " That 
will come, I suppose, like grey hair or corhn 
nails." But he made an immense hit in 
private theatricals as Sir Peter Teazle. 

The time came when he must at last tell 
his father that he could work up no interest 
in mathematical determinations of the 
amount of strain on a bridge. This seems 
to have been a staggering announcement to 
the man whose family had made Edinburgh 

xliv 



a world centre for that branch of applied 
science with which the name of Stevenson 
will be associated perhaps for ever, whose 
beacons shone on every sea, and whose firm 
were consulting engineers to the Japanese 
and the Indian governments. But Thomas 
Stevenson, after his first outburst of natural 
and profound regret, countenanced the liter- 
ary ambitions of his only son, and gave up 
with a sigh his one paternal dream. Never- 
theless, the notion that his Louis should 
grow into maturity without even a nominal 
profession — literature being inconceivable 
as the avowed calling of a respectable person 
— was opposed to a strict Calvinisms sense 
of duty to a son. Robert Louis Stevenson 
accordingly began to read for the bar, sup- 
plementing his uncoordinated notions of 
emphyteusis and levitation with detached 
impressions of the civil law and fraudulent 
conveyances. " Just enough mind work 
necessary to keep you from thinking of any- 
thing else," runs one of his jottings relative 
to this phase, " so that one simply ceases to 
be a reasoning being and feels stodged and 
stupid about the head." He was duly called 
to the Scotch bar when he was twenty-five 
and at once fled to France. 



xlv 



IV 

" We read his books with the curious sense of a 
haunting presence, as of some light-footed Ariel, or, 
in more solemn moments, of a spiritual form hovering 
near us. There is a body terrestrial and a body celes- 
tial ; the celestial body floats very near us in the liquid 
atmosphere of Stevenson's best work." — Rev. W. J. 
Dawson. 

FULL of a thousand projects for literary 
work, unwearying in the elaboration 
of essays, sketches, and tales, Robert 
Louis Stevenson had by this time made the 
personal acquaintance of such men of letters 
as Sidney Colvin, Andrew Lang, and Pro- 
fessor Masson. He had had a piece printed 
in Macmillari's Magazine and another in the 
Comhill just a year prior to his admission 
to the Scotch bar. An article on Beranger, 
another on Poe, and others still on John 
Knox were finding their way into the publi- 
cations of dignity to which they had been 
severally submitted by the advice of his new 
friends. Sidney Colvin helped him with in- 
troductions to editors, " who were glad, of 
course," notes that gentleman, " to welcome 
so promising a recruit." The head of the 

xlvi 



Stevensonian comet thus first showed itself 
definitely, although with starlike littleness. 
It now began to manifest its nucleus to the 
delighted constituency of the Cornhill, and 
in due time the scintillant tail filled the whole 
firmament of literature with its effulgence. 
The Academy, Temple Bar, and equally 
choice mediums for the dissemination of the 
Stevensonian brilliance, were resplendent 
with pleas for gas lamps, apologies for idlers, 
and dissertations on falling in love. So com- 
pelling was the blaze of style and so novel 
the point of view that every trifle inspired 
raptures, and the orbit of the latest luminary 
was computed hyperbolically. 

It was at this dawn of his fame, speedily 
brightened by the acceptance of the first of 
his stories ever printed, that Robert Louis 
Stevenson, amid the boats and bathers of 
the merry French tourist resort of Grez, met 
the woman he loved almost at first sight, 
and whom he crossed an ocean and a conti- 
nent in something like beggary to wed. Mrs. 
Robert Louis Stevenson was then simply 
Mrs. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, an 
American woman with two young children, 
who had recently come to France and had 
taken up the study of art. In the green inn 
garden at Grez, the young author, just back 

xlvii 



from the trip that was to result in his first pub- 
lished book, — "An Inland Voyage," — be- 
held a small, dark young woman, with clear- 
cut, delicate features, and endless sable hair. 
Not without significance are his epistolary 
allusions, at this period, to the delights of 
Grez and to the flow of its pellucid river 
and the meals in the cool arbour, under flut- 
tering leaves. The lady was sketching in 
charcoal the head of her future husband, 
although she wore no widow's veil. But the 
flowers of her first espousal had withered, 
and she bore unwillingly the name of Os- 
bourne. Circumstances connected with her 
impending legal separation from the husband 
in California now took the lady back across 
the Atlantic to her San Francisco home, and 
an end was put to this golden aspect of life 
in Grez. Robert Louis Stevenson had now 
a new purpose in life. Inspired as never 
before, he went on his " travels with a 
donkey " that were to result in so perfect a 
book, worked at four essays and a story that 
appeared in the Comhill, evolved the first of 
the " New Arabian Nights," did a story for 
Temple Bar and charmed the readers of the 
Portfolio with his " Picturesque Notes on 
Edinburgh." Thus at twenty-nine he had 
definitely taken up his life-work. But his fate 

xlviii 



was in California and thither he was now 
resolved to go. 

Robinson Crusoe was not more affection- 
ately entreated by his father to stay at home 
than was Robert Louis Stevenson by his lov- 
ing friends. But the Ediuburgh youth im- 
itated the mariner of York in that, consulting 
neither father nor mother any more, without 
any consideration of circumstances or con- 
sequences, he went on board a ship. It was 
bound for New York, and young Stevenson, 
while not a steerage passenger — travelling, 
indeed, second cabin — might as well, but 
for occasional leavings from the saloon pas- 
sengers' plates and the convenience of a 
rough table, have been in the steerage out- 
right. He reached New York in a flood of 
rain, repaired to an emigrants' boarding- 
house on the river front, sitting en route on 
some straw in the bottom of an express 
wagon, and in another twenty-four hours 
was speeding west on a freight train archi- 
tecturally modified to accommodate tourists 
as hopeful and as destitute as himself. He 
reached San Francisco like a man at death's 
door to learn that Mrs. Osboume was ill. 
He at once wrote " The Amateur Emigrant," 
plunged into essays on Thoreau and virtue, 
became lonely and unkempt, and was nursed 

xlix 



by his future wife, who had by this time ob- 
tained her divorce. The far away father in 
Edinburgh now relented, a substantial allow- 
ance was forthcoming, and Fanny Van de 
Grift Osbourne became Mrs. Robert Louis 
Stevenson. "As I look back," he wrote 
years later, " I think my marriage was the 
best move I ever made in my life." Not only 
would he do it again — he could not con- 
ceive the idea of doing otherwise. 

For the golden period of his literary 
achievement begins with this marriage. Un- 
til now he was a brilliant writer and that was 
all. Henceforth, he ceases to drift, for some 
subtle influence has brought home to him 
that the plastic art of literature is, in his 
very words, to embody character, thought 
or emotion in some act or attitude that shall 
be remarkable, striking to the mind's eye. 
" This is the highest and the hardest thing 
to do in words," we find him saying a few 
years after his marriage, when " Treasure 
Island " had taken form and substance — 
and " Treasure Island " was the first 
Stevenson book of which his peculiar public 
ever heard. It was undertaken at a sugges- 
tion from his new stepson, and worked out 
under the inspiration of the wife. From the 
eager schoolboy, his stepson, Lloyd Os- 
1 



bourne, he had derived his immense dis- 
covery that one of the natural appetites with 
which any " lively literature " has to count 
is the demand for fit and striking incident. 
" The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, 
himself a story, as the feeblest of children 
uses invention in his play ; and even as the 
imaginative grown person, joining in the 
game, at once enriches it with many de- 
lightful circumstances, the great creative 
writer shows us the realisation and the apo- 
theosis of the day-dreams of common men." 
The stories of the great creative writer may 
be informed with life's realities. Neverthe- 
less their proper function is to appease this 
appetite of readers for the right kind of thing 
falling out in the right kind of place. The 
characters must talk aptly, naturally. The 
incidents and the circumstances in the tale 
must blend like notes in music. The strands 
of a tale must be interwoven at proper inter- 
vals to form " a picture in the web," while 
the characters respond to a common stimu- 
lus at the right moment until the organic 
unity of the piece speaks home to the mind, 
and leaves an impression never to be effaced. 
" Crusoe, recoiling from the footprint, Achil- 
les shouting over against the Trojans, 
Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian 



running with his fingers in his ears — these 
are each culminating moments in the legend, 
and each has been printed on the mind's 
eye for ever." Other things, according to 
Stevenson's exposition of his especial art, 
we may forget — the words themselves, beau- 
tiful as they may be, the writer's incidental 
observations, charmed they never so well at 
the moment of reading, but these scenes, 
these epoch-making scenes, " which put the 
last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, 
at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic 
pleasure," go to the making of our lives as 
truly as the prayers said at a mother's knee, 
or the ecstasy of a first requited love. 

Until now we have had a Stevenson well 
content to write about some inn at Burford, 
or to describe scenery with the word- painters, 
the " sedulous ape " living with words for 
no ulterior purpose than practice, " as men 
learn to whittle." Now, he longs to seize 
on the heart of every suggestion, and to make 
a country famous with a legend. " It is one 
thing to remark and to dissect, with the 
most cutting logic, the complications of life 
and of the human spirit ; it is quite another 
to give them body and blood in the story of 
Ajax or of Hamlet." The first is literature, 
of course. But the last is art as well, and to 
lii 



that art Robert Louis Stevenson now began 
to apply his fitting key of words, long prac- 
tised on the literary scales. He sat down at 
last, legions of words swimming to his call, 
dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously 
bidding for his choice, and he himself know- 
ing what he wanted to do and able to do it. 
He had now figuratively as well as literally 
taken home his bride. The parental bless- 
ing had been bestowed. Three years after 
his marriage he had settled himself in the 
south of France in a cottage on the slope of 
a hill, his wife inspiring him, and his stepson 
becoming the most enthusiastic of literary 
constituents. But his nervous system had 
begun to be affected through the toxins 
evolved by the bacillus of his disease. Rob- 
ert Louis Stevenson's greatest work would 
well illustrate, in the opinion of Dr. Huber, 
the theory that the quality of a great man's 
genius, if he be consumptive, is affected by 
his disease. There is surely, contends this 
expert, " some sort of literary pathology " 
manifested in the transformation of Dr. 
Jekyll's benign face into the features of his 
devil nature ; in that man who feigned death 
(" The Master of Ballantrae ") and was 
buried, remaining months under ground, 
only, when exhumed, to gasp with the spark 
liii 



of animation that yet remained ; in the blind 
pirate of " Treasure Island," he of the quick, 
sharp footfalls that drew near and ever 
nearer the inn where lay the trembling boy. 
Certainly, the bacillus of Stevenson's tuber- 
culosis clung cruelly to him, notwithstand- 
ing his devotion to fresh air. That chimeri- 
cal terror of unpolluted oxygen, which made 
so many of our fathers close their windows, 
list their doors and seal themselves up with 
their own poisonous exhalations, had aroused 
Stevenson to protest in " The Amateur Emi- 
grant." By the time " The Strange Case of 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " had demon- 
strated to whole continents of readers that 
whomsoever else they read they must read 
Stevenson too, his physician was insisting 
upon a complete change of climate. The 
thoughts of the now illustrious romancer 
and essayist seem to have been more than 
ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy he at- 
tributes to his own father in the memorial 
sketch he gave to the world at this time. 
Thomas Stevenson died when " Jekyll and 
Hyde " was thrilling the world and in another 
twelvemonth Robert Louis Stevenson was 
settled once more in the United States at an 
elevation in the Adirondacks where a sana- 
torium had been lately set up for consump- 

liv 



tive patients. So greatly had his lot altered 
since he rode through New York in an ex- 
press wagon that he now refused an offer of 
ten thousand dollars from the New York 
World for an article every week for a year. 
" Kidnapped " was already, by its vogue, 
vindicating Stevenson's theory that a writer 
of his school may, " for the sake of circum- 
stantiation and because he is himself more 
or less grown up," admit character into his 
design within certain limits, — but only with- 
in certain limits. To add more traits than 
those of the heroes and the heroines of the 
Stevenson fictions were, in their creator's 
language, to be too clever, to stultify the 
tale, " to start the hare of moral or intellec- 
tual interest while we are running the fox 
of material interest," to commit the blunder 
of the playwright whose very lackeys must 
be men of wit. Certain readers, confessed 
Stevenson in one of the expositions of his own 
art which interpret him so finely, are apt 
to look somewhat down on incident. " It 
is thought clever to write a novel with no 
story at all or at least with a very dull one." 
Yet without Rawdon Crawley's blow to knit 
it all together, " Vanity Fair " could never 
have been made the work of art it is. " That 
scene is the chief ganglion of the tale." Not 

lv 



character, but incident — that woos us. In- 
cident plunges us into the tale, submerging 
us in it with the force of a billow — we forget 
the characters and push even the hero aside. 
Narrative, action, something doing at the 
right time, in the right place ! " Certain 
dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; cer- 
tain old houses demand to be haunted ; cer- 
tain coasts are set apart for shipwreck." 
Hence the artistic effort of Stevenson was 
everywhere and ever to fit the proper story 
to the proper place, and never to equip a 
puppet with a " character," as the lady 
novelist, dealing in " situations," does some- 
how. For he had not that incorrigible aber- 
ration of taste prompting a spirit of criticism 
yet more perverse to complain that the author 
of " The Master of Ballantrae " has no 
psychology of woman. The " tortured 
real," to purloin from the gem casket of 
Miss Elisabeth Luther Cary's rhetoric, " is 
corrected by the calm ideal " in such a de- 
scription as that of Newmarch in Mr. Henry 
James's novel of " The Sacred Fount; " but 
when Long John Silver, in " Treasure Is- 
land," strikes the sailor square in the spine 
with his crutch we cannot — to quaff anew 
at the well of Miss Cary's English undefiled 
■ — expect abstract synthesised beauty to hang 

lvi 



like a brooding angel over the tangled human 
spectacle. It is well that in " A London Life," 
by Mr. Henry James, the witty expression of 
Lady Davenant's face " shines like a lamp 
through the ground glass of her good breed- 
ing." It is better still that in the environ- 
ment of Robert Louis Stevenson's heroines 
he defines a pirate as a beard, a pair of 
wide trousers, and a liberal complement of 
pistols. 



Ivii 



" Under the wide and starry sky 
Dig the grave and let me lie; 
Glad did I live and gladly die 

And I laid me down with a will. 
This be the verse you grave for me : 
' Here he lies where he longed to be, 
Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 

And the hunter home from the hill.' " 
— j?. L. S. 

WHEN Robert Louis Stevenson was 
thirty-three, he surprised his old 
nurse, " Cummie," with the an- 
nouncement that he meant to dedicate to 
her his first volume of poetry. She, he told 
her, in the letter from Nice containing this 
news, was the only person who would really 
understand it. " He must have felt that he 
was doing a piece of work altogether ad- 
mirable," is the comment of Professor 
William P. Trent upon this pretty incident, 
and, adds this subtle critic, " he made a 
wonderfully successful book because he 
based it on real experience " — he had 
taken walks in " A Child's Garden of 
Verses," swung in its trees, peeped over its 

lviii 



wall. Marred as his boyhood had been 
by illness, adds Professor Trent, " it had 
been that rare thing in these modern days," 
a true childhood. For that one reason was 
it possible for him to produce such a master- 
piece of verse for the young as that begin- 
ning : " We built a ship upon the stairs." 
" Underwoods " was a book of poetry for 
older readers, brought out simultaneously 
in London and New York. It went into a 
second edition speedily, and thus cheered 
Stevenson in the gloom of his illness among 
the Adirondacks. " In the verse business I 
can do just what I like better than anything 
else," wrote Stevenson to a friend. Yet 
Professor Trent doubts if Stevenson's verses 
represent him fully. They are sane, their 
strong point, said Stevenson again, and to 
this Professor Trent subscribes. They were 
a wholesome and pleasant contrast to the 
rondeaux and delicate decadence of which 
healthy readers had grown sick. Yet many 
of the poems were the work of an invalid, 
a dying man in some flashes of inspiration. 
For it had begun to be evident to a vast and 
loving constituency that Robert Louis Ste- 
venson was under sentence of death. His 
health did not improve although his work 
had never been more brilliant. His wife 
lix 



travelled to San Francisco and chartered a 
yacht for those long cruises through the 
South Seas, of which he had dreamed as a 
child. For when little Louis played with 
his toy ships at Cummie's knee in the long 
ago, as Miss Catherine T. Bryce words it, 
in her " Robert Louis Stevenson Reader," 
he always wanted to sail to the far-away 
lands. " When I am a man," he told Cum- 
mie, " I shall visit the far-away lands." 
Just a week before he died Cummie, in 
Scotland, got a letter from her Master Lou, 
signed " your laddie, with all love," and 
announcing that he was getting fat. 

The histrionic instinct of a David Garrick 
could scarcely have heightened the scenic 
effect of Robert Louis Stevenson's depar- 
ture with his whole household upon that 
cruise through the remote Pacific isles, which 
was to end after three years of circumnavi- 
gation in a still newer and more surprising 
existence. Had the Stevensonian Odyssey 
been projected by an author of mere talent 
for the exploitation of his own personality, 
it might have compared not unfavourably 
with the loftiest flight of self- advertising in- 
spiration for which the late Phineas T. 
Barnum ever manifested a capacity. The 
more genuine spectacle of the greatest living 

lx 



artist in the use of English words, with the 
hand of death already raised to strike him, 
sailing for three adventurous years with his 
entire household among archipelagos of 
savages, imparted to the name of Robert 
Louis Stevenson an interest not less weird 
than that attaching to " The Strange Case 
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." His vicissi- 
tudes were now part of the news of the day. 
When in the year 1890 he fixed his abode 
among the Samoan Islands on the hills over- 
looking Apia and for the next four years 
played a prominent part in the affairs of a 
Pacific outpost of the first strategic impor- 
tance, for the possession of which three great 
powers had strained their mutual diplo- 
matic relations, it looked for a time as if the 
author of " The Master of Ballantrae " 
must prove as original a personality in 
world politics as he had become in English 
literature. 

But he had resolved to involve himself in 
no diplomatic intrigue. He strove from the 
very first to render his presence a source of 
uplift to the natives of the islands he learned 
to love. His three hundred acres in a moun- 
tain cleft were the setting of a big abode 
comprising a hall fifty feet long, wherein he 
dined in state, a great stairway leading to a 

lxi 



library upstairs, and rooms sufficient to ac- 
commodate a patriarchal establishment. 
Such was Vailima, source of the famous 
" Vailima Letters." And to this Vailima 
period belong " David Balfour " as we know 
him, " Weir of Hermiston," and " St. Ives." 
They sustain to the other books of Robert 
Louis Stevenson somewhat the artistic re- 
lation of " Little Dorrit " to the novels of 
Charles Dickens which preceded it. There 
is evidence everywhere of a growth of power 
distinguishing the writer of the highest genius 
from the mere author of popular books. 
We see evidence of Stevenson's new atti- 
tude toward his own work when he thinks 
regretfully of " St. Ives " as " a mere tissue 
of adventures." In " Weir of Hermiston " 
he cultivates what Mr. John Kelman im- 
pressively terms, " a solemnising and some- 
times terrifying seriousness in dealing with 
grave moral subjects," not discernible in 
" Prince Otto," for instance, or, to go back 
to a work suggestive of his earliest manner, 
" The Black Arrow." One might think the 
great performances of the Vailima days 
inspired by the beautiful prayers he com- 
posed for his household — an atavistic tend- 
ency being at work here surely, for his 
father and his grandfather and his great- 

lxii 



grandfather held family worship a thing as 
divinely ordained as the appointment of a 
definite number of the human race to eternal 
glory. 

The climate of Samoa, says Mr. Graham 
Balfour, had apparently answered the pur- 
pose of sustaining Stevenson in his long re- 
sistance of disease. His great embarrass- 
ment was on the score of expense. Prodig- 
ious as were his royalties, his mode of life 
consumed them ruthlessly. But his am- 
bitious projects promised an adequate rev- 
enue for years. " Weir of Hermiston " and 
"St. Ives " grew in splendour from his pen, 
and he had actually formed some plan of a 
lecture tour in the United States. Of this 
last project his mind was full when on a 
certain afternoon at sunset he descended the 
wide staircase with its posts flanked by 
Burmese idols. He made light of some 
presentiment of his wife's, yet, while gaily 
chatting, he cried out, putting his hands to 
his head : " What's that ? " His last words 
were spoken almost immediately afterward : 
" Do I look strange? " He died that night. 
Alexander Harvey. 



lxiii 



PART I 



A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES 



TO 

&IU;nn Cunningham 

FROM HER BOY 

FOR the long nights you lay awake 
And watched for my unworthy sake: 
For your most comfortable hand 
That led me through the uneven land: 
For all the story-books you read : 
For all the pains you comforted: 
For all you pitied, all you bore, 
In sad and happy days of yore: — 
My second Mother, my first Wife, 
The angel of my infant life — 
From the sick child, now well and old, 
Take, nurse, the little book you hold ! 

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read 
May find as dear a nurse at need, 
And every child who lists my rhyme, 
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime, 
May hear it in as kind a voice 
As made my childish days rejoice ! 

L. S. 



BED IN SUMMER 

IN winter I get up at night 
And dress by yellow candle-light. 
In summer, quite the other way, 
I have to go to bed by day. 

I have to go to bed and see 
The birds still hopping on the tree, 
Or hear the grown-up people's feet 
Still going past me in the street. 

And does it not seem hard to you, 
When all the sky is clear and blue, 
And I should like so much to play, 
To have to go to bed by day? 



A THOUGHT 

IT is very nice to think 
The world is full of meat and drink, 
With little children saying grace 
In every Christian kind of place. 



AT THE SEA- SIDE 

WHEN I was down beside the sea 
A wooden spade they gave to me 
To dig the sandy shore. 

My holes were empty like a cup. 
In every hole the sea came up, 
Till it could come no more. 



YOUNG NIGHT THOUGHT 

ALL night long and every night, 
When my mama puts out the light, 
I see the people marching by, 
As plain as day, before my eye. 

Armies and emperors and kings, 
All carrying different kinds of things, 
And marching in so grand a way, 
You never saw the like by day. 

So fine a show was never seen 
At the great circus on the green; 
For every kind of beast and man 
Is marching in that caravan. 

At first they move a little slow, 
But still the faster on they go, 
And still beside them close I keep 
Until we reach the town of Sleep. 



10 



WHOLE DUTY OF CHILDREN 

A CHILD should always say what's true 
And speak when he is spoken to, 
And behave mannerly at table; 
At least as far as he is able. 



ii 



RAIN 

THE rain is raining all around, 
It falls on field and tree, 
It rains on the umbrellas here, 
And on the ships at sea. 



ia 



PIRATE STORY 

THREE of us afloat in the meadow by 
the swing, 
Three of us aboard in the basket on the 
lea. 
Winds are in the air, they are blowing in 
the spring, 
And waves are on the meadow like the 
waves there are at sea. 



Where shall we adventure, to-day that we're 
afloat, 
Wary of the weather and steering by a 
star? 
Shall it be to Africa, a-steering of the boat, 
To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Mala- 
bar? 



Hi! but here's a squadron a-rowing on the 
sea — 
Cattle on the meadow a-charging with a 
roar! 

13 



Quick, and we'll escape them, they're as 
mad as they can be, 
The wicket is the harbour and the garden 
is the shore. 



FOREIGN LANDS 

UP into the cherry tree 
Who should climb but little me? 
I held the trunk with both my hands 
And looked abroad on foreign lands. 

I saw the next door garden lie, 
Adorned with flowers, before my eye, 
And many pleasant places more 
That I had never seen before. 

I saw the dimpling river pass 
And be the sky's blue looking-glass; 
The dusty roads go up and down 
With people tramping in to town. 

If I could find a higher tree 
Farther and farther I should see, 
To where the grown-up river slips 
Into the sea among the ships. 

To where the roads on either hand 
Lead onward into fairy land, 
Where all the children dine at five, 
And all the playthings come alive. 
15 



WINDY NIGHTS 

WHENEVER the moon and stars are 
set, 
Whenever the wind is high, 
All night long in the dark and wet, 

A man goes riding by. 
Late in the night when the fires are out, 
Why does he gallop and gallop about? 

Whenever the trees are crying aloud, 

And ships are tossed at sea, 
By, on the highway, low and loud, 

By at the gallop goes he. 
By at the gallop he goes, and then 
By he comes back at the gallop again. 



16 



TRAVEL 

I SHOULD like to rise and go 
Where the golden apples grow; — 
Where below another sky 
Parrot islands anchored lie, 
And, watched by cockatoos and goats, 
Lonely Crusoes building boats; — 
Where in sunshine reaching out 
Eastern cities, miles about, 
Are with mosque and minaret 
Among sandy gardens set, 
And the rich goods from near and far 
Hang for sale in the bazaar, — 
Where the Great Wall round China goes, 
And on one side the desert blows, 
And with bell and voice and drum, 
Cities on the other hum ; — 
Where are forests, hot as fire, 
Wide as England, tall as a spire, 
Full of apes and cocoa-nuts 
And the negro hunters' huts; — 
Where the knotty crocodile 
Lies and blinks in the Nile, 
*7 



And the red flamingo flies 
Hunting fish before his eyes; — 
Where in jungles, near and far, 
Man-devouring tigers are, 
Lying close and giving ear 
Lest the hunt be drawing near, 
Or a comer-by be seen 
Swinging in a palanquin; — 
Where among the desert sands 
Some deserted city stands, 
All its children, sweep and prince, 
Grown to manhood ages since, 
Not a foot in street or house, 
Not a stir of 'child or mouse, 
And when kindly falls the night, 
In all the town no spark of light. 
There I'll come when I'm a man 
With a camel caravan ; 
Light a fire in the gloom 
Of some dusty dining-room ; 
See the pictures on the walls, 
Heroes, fights and festivals; 
And in a corner find the toys 
Of the old Egyptian boys. 



i3 



SINGING 

OF speckled eggs the birdie sings 
And nests among the trees; 
The sailor sings of ropes and things 
In ships upon the seas. 

The children sing in far Japan, 
The children sing in Spain; 

The organ with the organ man 
Is singing in the rain. 



19 



LOOKING FORWARD 

WHEN I am grown to man's estate 
I shall be very proud and great, 
And tell the other girls and boys 
Not to meddle with my toys. 



A GOOD PLAY 

WE built a ship upon the stairs 
All made of the back-bedroom 
chairs, 
And filled it full of sofa pillows 
To go a-sailing on the billows. 

We took a saw and several nails, 
And water in the nursery pails; 
And Tom said, "Let us also take 
An apple and a slice of cake;" — 
Which was enough for Tom and me 
To go a-sailing on, till tea. 

We sailed along for days and days, 
And had the very best of plays; 
But Tom fell out and hurt his knee., 
So there was no one left but me. 



21 



WHERE GO THE BOATS? 

DARK brown is the river, 
Golden is the sand. 
It flows along for ever, 
With trees on either hand. 

Green leaves a-floating, 

Castles of the foam, 
Boats of mine a-boating — 

Where will all come home? 

On goes the river 

And out past the mill, 

Away down the valley, 
Away down the hill. 

Away down the river, 
A hundred miles or more, 

Other little children 

Shall bring my boats ashore. 



AUNTIE'S SKIRTS 

WHENEVER Auntie moves around, 
Her dresses make a curious sound, 
They trail behind her up the floor, 
And trundle after through the door. 



2.3 



THE LAND OF COUNTERPANE 

WHEN I was sick and lay a-bed, 
I had two pillows at my head, 
And all my toys beside me lay 
To keep me happy all the day. 

And sometimes for an hour or so 
I watched my leaden soldiers go, 
With different uniforms and drills, 
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills 

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets 
All up and down among the sheets; 
Or brought my trees and houses out, 
And planted cities all about. 

I was the giant great and still 
That sits upon the pillow-hill, 
And sees before him, dale and plain, 
The pleasant land of counterpane. 



24 



THE LAND OF NOD 

FROM breakfast on through all the day 
At home among my friends I stay, 
But every night I go abroad 
Afar into the land of Nod. 

All by myself I have to go, 

With none to tell me what to do — 

All alone beside the streams 

And up the mountain-sides of dreams. 

The strangest things are there for me, 
Both things to eat and things to see, 
And many frightening sights abroad 
Till morning in the land of Nod. 

Try as I like to find the way, 
I never can get back by day, 
Nor can remember plain and clear 
The curious music that I hear. 



25 



MY SHADOW 

I HAVE a little shadow that goes in and 
out with me, 
And what can be the use of him is more 

than I can see. 
He is very, very like me from the heels up 

to the head; 
And I see him jump before me, when I jump 
into my bed. 

The funniest thing about him is the way he 

likes to grow — 
Not at all like proper children, which is 

always very slow; 
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an 

India-rubber ball, 
And he sometimes gets so little that there's 

none of him at all. 

He hasn't got a notion of how children 

ought to play, 
And can only make a fool of me in every 

sort of way. 

26 



He stays so close beside me, he's a coward 

you can see; 
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that 

shadow sticks to me! 

One morning, very early, before the sun 

was up, 
I rose and found the shining dew on every 

buttercup; 
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant 

sleepy-head, 
Had stayed at home behind me and was 

fast asleep in bed. 



27 



SYSTEM 

EVERY night my prayers I say, 
And get my dinner every day; 
And every day that I've been good, 
I get an orange after food. 

The child that is not clean and neat, 
With lots of toys and things to eat, 
He is a naughty child, I'm sure — 
Or else his dear papa is poor. 



A GOOD BOY 

I WOKE before the morning, I was happy 
all the day, 
I never said an ugly word, but smiled and 
stuck to play. 

And now at last the sun is going down 

behind the wood, 
And I am very happy, for I know that I've 

been good. 

My bed is waiting cool and fresh, with linen 

smooth and fair, 
And I must off to sleepsin-by, and not 

forget my prayer. 

I know that, till to-morrow I shall see the 

sun arise, 
No ugly dream shall fright my mind, no 

ugly sight my eyes. 

But slumber hold me tightly till I waken in 

the dawn, 
And hear the thrushes singing in the lilacs 

round the lawn. 

29 



ESCAPE AT BEDTIME 

THE lights from the parlour and kitchen 
shone out 
Through the blinds and the windows and 
bars; 
And high overhead and all moving about, 

There were thousands of millions of stars. 
There ne'er were such thousands of leaves 
on a tree, 
Nor of people in church or the Park, 
As the crowds of the stars that looked down 
upon me, 
And that glittered and winked in the dark. 

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, 
and all, 
And the star of the sailor, and Mars, 
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall 

Would be half full of water and stars. 
They saw me at last, and they chased me 
with cries, 
And they soon had me packed into bed; 
But the glory kept shining and bright in 
my eyes, 
And the stars going round in my head. 
30 



MARCHING SONG 

BRING the comb and play upon it! 
Marching, here we come ! 
Willie cocks his highland bonnet, 
Johnnie beats the drum. 

Mary Jane commands the party, 

Peter leads the rear; 
Feet in time, alert and hearty, 

Each a Grenadier! 

All in the most martial manner 

Marching double-quick; 
While the napkin like a banner 

Waves upon the stick! 

Here's enough of fame and pillage, 

Great commander Jane! 
Now that we've been round the village, 

Let's go home again. 



THE COW 

THE friendly cow all red and white, 
I love with all my heart : 
She gives me cream with all her might, 
To eat with apple-tart. 

She wanders lowing here and there, 

And yet she cannot stray, 
All in the pleasant open air, 

The pleasant light of day; 

And blown by all the winds that pass 
And wet with all the showers, 

She walks among the meadow grass 
And eats the meadow flowers. 



& 



HAPPY THOUGHT 

THE world is so full of a number of 
things, 
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 



S3 



THE WIND 

I SAW you toss the kites on high 
And blow the birds about the sky; 
And all around I heard you pass, 
Like ladies' skirts across the grass — 
O wind, a-blowing all day long, 
O wind, that sings so loud a song! 

I saw the different things you did, 
But always you yourself you hid. 
I felt you push, I heard you call, 
I could not see yourself at all — 
O wind, a-blowing all day long, 
O wind, that sings so loud a song, 

O you that are so strong and cold, 
O blower, are you young or old? 
Are you a beast of field and tree, 
Or just a stronger child than me? 
O wind, a-blowing all day long, 
O wind, that sings so loud a song! 



34 



KEEPSAKE MILL 

OVER the borders, a sin without pardon, 
Breaking the branches and crawling 
below, 
Out through the breach in the wall of the 
garden, 
Down by the banks of the river, we go. 

Here is the mill with the humming of 

thunder, 

Here is the weir with the wonder of foam, 

Here is the sluice with the race running 

under — 

Marvellous places, though handy to home! 

Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller, 
Stiller the note of the birds on the hill; 

Dusty and dim are the eyes of the miller, 
Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill. 

Years may go by, and the wheel in the river 
Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day, 

Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for 
ever 
Long after all of the boys are away. 

35 



Home from the Indies and home from the 
ocean, 
Heroes and soldiers we all shall come 
home; 
Still we shall find the old mill wheel in 
motion, 
Turning and churning that river to foam. 

You with the bean that I gave when we 
quarrelled, 
I with your marble of Saturday last, 
Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled, 
Here we shall meet and remember the 
past. 



3* 



GOOD AND BAD CHILDREN 

CHILDREN, you are very little, 
And your bones are very brittle; 
If you would grow great and stately, 
You must try to walk sedately. 

You must still be bright and quiet, 
And content with simple diet; 
And remain, through all bewild'ring, 
Innocent and honest children. 

Happy hearts and happy faces, 
Happy play in grassy places — 
That was how, in ancient ages, 
Children grew to kings and sages. 

But the unkind and the unruly, 
And the sort who eat unduly, 
They must never hope for glory — 
Theirs is quite a different story ! 

Cruel children, crying babies, 
All grow up as geese and gabies, 
Hated, as their age increases, 
By their nephews and their nieces. 
37 



FOREIGN CHILDREN 

LITTLE Indian, Sioux or Crow, 
Little frosty Eskimo, 
Little Turk or Japanee, 
O! don't you wish that you were me? 

You have seen the scarlet trees 
And the lions over seas; 
You have eaten ostrich eggs, 
And turned the turtles off their legs. 

Such a life is very fine, 
But it's not so nice as mine: 
You must often, as you trod, 
Have wearied, not to be abroad. 

You have curious things to eat, 
I am fed on proper meat ; 
You must dwell beyond the foam, 
But I am safe and live at home. 

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, 
Little frosty Eskimo, 
Little Turk or Japanee, 
O! don't you wish that you were me? 
38 



THE SUN'S TRAVELS 

THE sun is not a-bed, when I 
At night upon my pillow lie ; 
Still round the earth his way he takes, 
And morning after morning makes. 

While here at home, in shining day, 
We round the sunny garden play, 
Each little Indian sleepy-head 
Is being kissed and put to bed. 

And when at eve I rise from tea, 
Day dawns beyond the Atlantic Sea; 
And all the children in the West 
Are getting up and being dressed. 



39 



THE LAMPLIGHTER 

MY tea is nearly ready and the sun 
has left the sky; 
It's time to take the window to see Leerie 

going by; 
For every night at teatime and before you 

take your seat, 
With lantern and with ladder he comes 
posting up the street. 

Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go 

to sea, 
And my papa's a banker and as rich as he 

can be; 
But I, when I am stronger and can choose 

what I'm to do, 
O Leerie, I'll go round at night and light 

the lamps with you ! 

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before 

the door, 
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so 

many more; 

40 



And O! before you hurry by with ladder 

and with light; 
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him 

to-night ! 



4* 



MY BED IS A BOAT 

Y bed is like a little boat; 
Nurse helps me in when I embark; 
She girds me in my sailor's coat 
And starts me in the dark. 

At night, I go on board and say 

Good night to all my friends on shore; 

I shut my eyes and sail away 
And see and hear no more. 

And sometimes things to bed I take, 

As prudent sailors have to do; 
Perhaps a slice of wedding-cake, 

Perhaps a toy or two. 

All night across the dark we steer; 

But when the day returns at last, 
Safe in my room, beside the pier, 

I find my vessel fast. 



42 



THE MOON 

THE moon has a face like the clock in 
the hall; 
She shines on thieves on the garden wall, 
On streets and fields and harbour quays, 
And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees. 

The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse, 
The howling dog by the door of the house, 
The bat that lies in bed at noon, 
All love to be out by the light of the moon. 

But all of the things that belong to the day 
Cuddle to sleep to be out of her way; 
And flowers and children close their eyes 
Till up in the morning the sun shall arise. 



43 



THE SWING 

HOW do you like to go up in a swin{ 
Up in the air so blue? 
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing 
Ever a child can do! 

Up in the air and over the wall, 

Till I can see so wide, 
Rivers and trees and cattle and all 

Over the countryside — 

Till I look down on the garden green, 
Down on the roof so brown — 

Up in the air I go flying again, 
Up in the air and down! 



44 



TIME TO RISE 

A BIRDIE with a yellow bill 
Hopped upon the window sill, 
Cocked his shining eye and said: 
"Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!" 



45 



s 



LOOKING-GLASS RIVER 

MOOTH it slides upon its travel, 
Here a wimple, there a gleam — 
O the clean gravel ! 
O the smooth stream! 



Sailing blossoms, silver fishes, 
Paven pools as clear as air — 
How a child wishes 
To live down there ! 

We can see our coloured faces 
Floating on the shaken pool 
Down in cool places, 
Dim and very cool ; 

Till a wind or water wrinkle, 
Dipping marten, plumping trout- 
Spreads in a twinkle 
And blots all out. 

See the rings pursue each other; 
All below grows black as night, 
Just as if mother 
Had blown out the light 1 
4 6 



Patience, children, just a minute 
See the spreading circles die; 
The stream and all in it 
Will clear by-and-by. 



47 



FAIRY BREAD 

COME up here, O dusty feet! 
Here is fairy bread to eat. 
Here in my retiring room, 
Children, you may dine 
On the golden smell of broom 

And the shade of pine; 
And when you have eaten well, 
Fairy stories hear and tell. 



48 



FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE 

FASTER than fairies, faster than witches, 
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; 
And charging along like troops in a battle, 
All through the meadows the horses and 

cattle: 
All of the sights of the hill and the plain 
Fly as thick as driving rain ; 
And ever again, in the wink of an eye, 
Painted stations whistle by. 

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles, 
All by himself and gathering brambles; 
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes; 
And there is the green for stringing the 

daisies! 
Here is a cart run away in the road 
Lumping along with man and load; 
And here is a mill and there is a river: 
Each a glimpse and gone for ever! 



49 



WINTER-TIME 

FATE lies the wintry sun a-bed, 
A frosty, fiery sleepy-head ; 
Blinks but an hour or two; and then, 
A blood-red orange, sets again. 

Before the stars have left the skies, 
At morning in the dark I rise; 
And shivering in my nakedness, 
By the cold candle, bathe and dress. 

Close by the jolly fire I sit 
To warm my frozen bones a bit; 
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore 
The colder countries round the door. 

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap 
Me in my comforter and cap; 
The cold wind burns my face, and blows 
Its frosty pepper up my nose. 

Black are my steps on silver sod; 
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad; 
And tree and house, and hill and lake, 
Are frosted like a wedding-cake, 
.so 



THE HAYLOFT 

THROUGH all the pleasant meadow- 
side 
The grass grew shoulder-high, 
Till the shining scythes went far and wide 
And cut it down to dry. 

These green and sweetly smelling crops 

They led in wagons home; 
And they piled them here in mountain tops 

For mountaineers to roam. 

Here is Mount Clear, Mount Rusty-Nail, 
Mount Eagle and Mount High; — 

The mice that in these mountains dwell, 
No happier are than I ! 

O what a joy to clamber there, 

O what a place for play, 
With the sweet, the dim, the dusty air, 

The happy hills of hay ! 



51 



FAREWELL TO THE FARM 

THE coach is at the door at last; 
The eager children, mounting fast 
And kissing hands, in chorus sing: 
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything! 

To house and garden, field and lawn, 
The meadow-gates we swang upon, 
To pump and stable, tree and swing, 
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything! 

And fare you well for evermore, 
O ladder at the hayloft door, 
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling, 
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything! 

Crack goes the whip, and off we go; 
The trees and houses smaller grow; 
Last, round the woody turn we swing; 
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything! 



52 



NORTHWEST PASSAGE 

I. GOOD NIGHT 

WHEN the bright lamp is carried in, 
The sunless hours again begin; 
O'er all without, in field and lane, 
The haunted night returns again. 

Now we behold the embers flee 
About the firelit hearth; and see 
Our pictures painted as we pass, 
Like pictures, on the window-glass. 

Must we to bed indeed? Well, then, 
Let us arise and go like men, 
And face with an undaunted tread 
The long black passage up to bed. 

Farewell, O brother, sister, sire! 
O pleasant party round the fire ! 
The songs you sing, the tales you tell, 
Till far to-morrow, fare ye well ! 



53 



II. SHADOW MARCH 

ALL round the house is the jet-black 
night ; 
It stares through the window-pane; 
It crawls in the corners, hiding from the 
light, 
And it moves with the moving flame. 

Now my little heart goes a-beating like a 
drum, 
With the breath of Bogie in my hair, 
And all round the candle the crooked 
shadows come, 
And go marching along up the stair. 

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of 
the lamp, 
The shadow of the child that goes to bed — 
All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, 
tramp, tramp, 
With the black night overhead. 

III. IN PORT 

LAST, to the chamber where I lie 
My fearful footsteps patter nigh, 
And come from out the cold and gloom 
Into my warm and cheerful room. 

54 



There, safe arrived, we turn about 
To keep the coming shadows out, 
And close the happy door at last 
On all the perils that we past. 

Then, when mamma goes by to bed, 
She shall come in with tip-toe tread, 
And see me lying warm and fast 
And in the Land of Nod at last. 



55 



THE CHILD ALONE 



THE UNSEEN PLAYMATE 

WHEN children are playing alone on 
the green, 
In comes the playmate that never was seen. 
When children are happy and lonely and 

good, 
The Friend of the Children comes out of the 
wood. 

Nobody heard him and nobody saw, 
His is a picture you never could draw, 
But he's sure to be present, abroad or at 

home, 
When children are happy and playing alone. 

He lies in the laurels, he runs on the grass, 
He sings when you tinkle the musical glass; 
Whene'er you are happy and cannot tell 

why, 
The Friend of the Children is sure to be by ! 

He loves to be little, he hates to be big, 
Tis he that inhabits the caves that you dig; 

59 



Tis he when you play with your soldiers of 

tin 
That sides with the Frenchman and never 

can win. 
Tis he, when at night you go off to your 

bed, 
Bids you go to your sleep and not trouble 

your head; 
For wherever they're lying, in cupboard or 

shelf, 
'Tis he will take care of your playthings 

himself! 



60 



MY SHIP AND I 

OITS I that am the captain of a tidy 
little ship, 
Of a ship that goes a-sailing on the pond; 
And my ship it keeps a-turning all around 

and all about; 
But when I'm a little older, I shall find the 
secret out 
How to send my vessel sailing on beyond. 

For I mean to grow as little as the dolly at 
the helm, 
And the dolly I intend to come alive; 
And with him beside to help me, it's a-sailing 

I shall go, 
It's a-sailing on the water, when the jolly 
breezes blow 
And the vessel goes a divie-divie-dive. 

O it's then you'll see me sailing through the 

rushes and the reeds, 
And you'll hear the water singing at the 

prow; 

61 



For beside the dolly sailor, I'm to voyage 

and explore, 
To land upon the island where no dolly was 

before, 
And to fire the penny cannon in the bow, 



62 



MY KINGDOM 

DOWN by a shining water well 
I found a very little dell, 
No higher than my head. 
The heather and the gorse about 
In summer bloom were coming out, 
Some yellow and some red. 

I called the little pool a sea; 
The little hills were big to me; 

For I am very small. 
I made a boat, I made a town, 
I searched the caverns up and down, 

And named them one and all. 

And all about was mine, I said, 
The little sparrows overhead, 

The little minnows too. 
This was the world and I was king; 
For me the bees came by to sing, 

For me the swallows flew. 

I played there were no deeper seas, 
Nor any wider plains than these, 
Nor other kings than me. 
63 



At last I heard my mother call 
Out from the house at evenfall, 
To call me home to tea. 

And I must rise and leave my dell, 
And leave my dimpled water well, 

And leave my heather blooms. 
Alas! and as my home I neared, 
How very big my nurse appeared, 

How great and cool the rooms ! 



64 



PICTURE-BOOKS IN WINTER 

SUMMER fading, winter comes — 
Frosty mornings, tingling thumbs, 
Window robins, winter rooks, 
And the picture story-books. 

Water now is turned to stone 
Nurse and I can walk upon ; 
Still we find the flowing brooks 
In the picture story-books. 

All the pretty things put by, 
Wait upon the children's eye, 
Sheep and shepherds, trees and crooks, 
In the picture story-books. 

We may see how all things are, 
Seas and cities, near and far, 
And the flying fairies' looks, 
In the picture story-books. 

How am I to sing your praise, 
Happy chimney-corner days, 
Sitting safe in nursery nooks, 
Reading picture story-books? 
65 



MY TREASURES 

THESE nuts, that I keep in the back of 
the nest 
Where all my lead soldiers are lying at rest, 
Were gathered in autumn by nursie and me 
In a wood with a well by the side of the sea. 

This whistle we made (and how clearly it 

sounds !) 
By the side of a field at the end of the 

grounds. 
Of a branch of a plane, with a knife of my 

own, 
It was nursie who made it, and nursie alone! 

The stone, with the white and the yellow 

and gray, 
We discovered I cannot tell how far away; 
And I carried it back although weary and 

cold, 
For though father denies it, I'm sure it is 

gold. 

66 



But of all my treasures the last is the king, 
For there's very few children possess such 

a thing; 
And that is a chisel, both handle and blade, 
Which a man who was really a carpenter 

made. 



BLOCK CITY 

WHAT are you able to build with 
your blocks ? 
Castles and palaces, temples and docks. 
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, 
But I can be happy and building at home. 

Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea, 
There I'll establish a city for me: 
A kirk and a mill and a palace beside, 
And a harbour as well where my vessels 
may ride. 

Great is the palace with pillar and wall, 
A sort of a tower on the top of it all, 
And steps coming down in an orderly way 
To where my toy vessels lie safe in the bay. 

This one is sailing and that one is moored: 
Hark to the song of the sailors on board! 
And see on the steps of my palace, the kings 
Coming and going with presents and things ! 
68 



Now I have done with it, down let it go! 
All in a moment the town is laid low. 
Block upon block lying scattered and free, 
What is there left of my town by the sea? 

Yet as I saw it, I see it again, 

The kirk and the palace, the ships and the 

men, 
And as long as I live and where'er I may be, 
I'll always remember my town by the sea. 



THE LAND OF STORY-BOOKS 

AT evening when the lamp is lit, 
Around the fire my parents sit; 
They sit at home and talk and sing, 
And do not play at anything. 

Now, with my little gun, I crawl 
All in the dark along the wall, 
And follow round the forest track 
Away behind the sofa back. 

There, in the night, where none can spy, 
All in my hunter's camp I lie, 
And play at books that I have read 
Till it is time to go to bed. 

These are the hills, these are the woods, 
These are my starry solitudes; 
And there the river by whose brink 
The roaring lions come to drink. 

I see the others far away 
As if in firelit camp they lay, 
And I, like to an Indian scout, 
Around their party prowled about. 



So, when my nurse comes in for me, 
Home I return across the sea, 
And go to bed with backward looks 
At my dear land of Story-books. 



7i 



ARMIES IN THE FIRE 

THE lamps now glitter down the street; 
Faintly sound the falling feet; 
And the blue even slowly falls 
About the garden trees and walls. 

Now in the falling of the gloom 
The red fire paints the empty room: 
And warmly on the roof it looks, 
And flickers on the backs of books. 

Armies march by tower and spire 
Of cities blazing, in the fire; — 
Till as I gaze with staring eyes, 
The armies fade, the lustre dies. 

Then once again the glow returns; 
Again the phantom city burns; 
And down the red-hot valley, lo! 
The phantom armies marching go! 

Blinking embers, tell me true 
Where are those armies marching to, 
And what the burning city is 
That crumbles in your furnaces! 

72 



THE LITTLE LAND 

WHEN at home alone I sit 
And am very tired of it, 
I have just to shut my eyes 
To go sailing through the skies — 
To go sailing far away 
To the pleasant Land of Play; 
To the fairy-land afar 
Where the Little People are; 
Where the clover-tops are trees, 
And the rain-pools are the seas, 
And the leaves like little ships 
Sail about on tiny trips; 

And above the daisy tree 

Through the grasses, 
High o'erhead the Bumble Bee 

Hums and passes. 

In that forest to and fro 
I can wander, I can go; 
See the spider and the fly, 
And the ants go marching by 
Carrying parcels with their feet 
Down the green and grassy street. 

73 



I can in the sorrel sit 

Where the ladybird alit. 

I can climb the jointed grass 

And on high 
See the greater swallows pass 

In the sky, 
And the round sun rolling by 
Heeding no such things as I. 

Through that forest I can pass 
Till, as in a looking-glass, 
Humming fly and daisy tree 
And my tiny self I see, 
Painted very clear and neat 
On the rain-pool at my feet. 
Should a leaflet come to land 
Drifting near to where I stand, 
Straight Til board that tiny boat 
Round the rain-pool sea to float. 
Little thoughtful creatures sit 
On the grassy coasts of it ; 
Little things with lovely eyes 
See me sailing with surprise. 
Some are clad in armour green — 
(These have sure to battle been !) - 
Some are pied with ev'ry hue, 
Black and crimson, gold and blue; 

74 



Some have wings and swift are gone;- 
But they all look kindly on. 

When my eyes I once again 
Open, and see all things plain: 
High bare walls, great bare floor; 
Great big knobs on drawer and door; 
Great big people perched on chairs, 
Stitching tucks and mending tears, 
Each a hill that I could climb, 
And talking nonsense all the time — 

O dear me, 

That I could be 
A sailor on the rain-pool sea, 
A climber in the clover tree, 
And just come back, a sleepy-head, 
Late at night to go to bed. 



75 



GARDEN DAYS 



NIGHT AND DAY 

WHEN the golden day is done, 
Through the closing portal, 
Child and garden, flower and sun, 
Vanish all things mortal. 

As the blinding shadows fall 

As the rays diminish, 
Under evening's cloak, they all 

Roll away and vanish. 

Garden darkened, daisy shut, 
Child in bed, they slumber — 

Glow-worm in the highway rut, 
Mice among the lumber. 

In the darkness houses shine, 
Parents move with candles; 

Till on all, the night divine 
Turns the bedroom handles. 

Till at last the day begins 

In the east a-breaking, 
In the hedges and the whins 

Sleeping birds a-waking. 
79 



In the darkness shapes of things, 

Houses, trees and hedges, 
Clearer grow; and sparrow's wings 

Beat on window ledges. 

These shall wake the yawning maid; 

She the door shall open — 
Finding dew on garden glade 

And the morning broken. 

There my garden grows again 

Green and rosy painted, 
As at eve behind the pane 

From my eyes it fainted. 

Just as it was shut away, 

Toy-like in the even, 
Here I see it glow with day 

Under glowing heaven. 

Every path and every plot, 

Every bush of roses, 
Every blue forget-me-not 

Where the dew reposes, 

"Up!" they cry, "the day is come 

On the smiling valleys: 
We have beat the morning drum; 

Playmate, join your allies!" 

80 



NEST EGGS 

BIRDS all the sunny day 
Flutter and quarrel 
Here in the arbour-like 
Tent of the laurel. 

Here in the fork 

The brown nest is seated; 
Four little blue eggs 

The mother keeps heated. 

While we stand watching her, 

Staring like gabies, 
Safe in each egg are the 

Bird's little babies. 

Soon the frail eggs they shall 
Chip, and upspringing 

Make all the April woods 
Merry with singing. 

Younger than we are, 
O children, and frailer, 

Soon in blue air they'll be, 
Singer and sailor. 
81 



We, so much older, 
Taller and stronger, 

We shall look down on the 
Birdies no longer. 

They shall go flying 
With musical speeches 

High overhead in the 
Tops of the beeches. 

In spite of our wisdom 
And sensible talking, 

We on our feet must go 
Plodding and walking. 



82 



THE FLOWERS 

ALL the names I know from nurse : 
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse, 
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock, 
And the Lady Hollyhock. 

Fairy places, fairy things, 

Fairy woods where the wild bee wings, 

Tiny trees for tiny dames — 

These must all be fairy names ! 

Tiny woods below whose boughs 
Shady fairies weave a house; 
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme, 
Where the braver fairies climb ! 

Fair are grown-up people's trees, 
But the fairest woods are these; 
Where if I were not so tall, 
I should live for good and all. 



83 



SUMMER SUN 

GREAT is tHe sun, and wide he goes 
Through empty heaven without repose; 
And in the blue and glowing days 
More thick than rain he showers his rays. 

Though closer still the blinds we pull 
To keep the shady parlour cool, 
Yet he will find a chink or two 
To slip his golden fingers through. 

The dusty attic spider-clad 
He, through the keyhole, maketh glad; 
And through the broken edge of tiles, 
Into the laddered hay-loft smiles. 

Meantime his golden face around 
He bears to all the garden ground, 
And sheds a warm and glittering look 
Among the ivy's inmost nook. 

Above the hills, along the blue, 
Round the bright air with footing true, 
To please the child, to paint the rose, 
The gardener of the World, he goes. 

84 



THE DUMB SOLDIER 

WHEN the grass was closely mown, 
Walking on the lawn alone, 
In the turf a hole I found 
And hid a soldier underground. 

Spring and daisies came apace; 
Grasses hide my hiding place; 
Grasses run like a green sea 
O'er the lawn up to my knee. 

Under grass alone he lies, 
Looking up with leaden eyes, 
Scarlet coat and pointed gun, 
To the stars and to the sun. 

When the grass is ripe like grain, 
When the scythe is stoned again, 
When the lawn is shaven clear, 
Then my hole shall reappear. 

I shall find him, never fear, 
I shall find my grenadier; 
But for all that's gone and come, 
I shall find my soldier dumb. 

85 



He has lived, a little thing, 
In the grassy woods of spring; 
Done, if he could tell me true, 
Just as I should like to do. 

He has seen the starry hours 
And the springing of the flowers; 
And the fairy things that pass 
In the forests of the grass. 

In the silence he has heard 
Talking bee and ladybird, 
And the butterfly has flown 
O'er him as he lay alone. 

Not a word will he disclose, 
Not a word of all he knows. 
I must lay him on the shelf, 
And make up the tale myself. 



AUTUMN FIRES 

IN the other gardens 
And all up the vale, 
From the autumn bonfires 
See the smoke trail ! 

Pleasant summer over 

And all the summer flowers, 
The red fire blazes, 

The gray smoke towers. 

Sing a song of seasons ! 

Something bright in all! 
Flowers in the summer, 

Fires in the fall ! 



S7 



THE GARDENER 

THE gardener does not love to talk, 
He makes me keep the gravel walk; 
And when he puts his tools away, 
He locks the door and takes the key. 

Away behind the currant row 
Where no one else but cook may go, 
Far in the plots, I see him dig, 
Old and serious, brown and big. 

He digs the flowers, green, red, and blue, 
Nor wishes to be spoken to. 
He digs the flowers and cuts the hay, 
And never seems to want to play. 

Silly gardener! summer goes, 
And winter comes with pinching toes, 
When in the garden bare and brown 
You must lay your barrow down. 

Well now, and while the summer stays, 
To profit by these garden days 
O how much wiser you would be 
To play at Indian wars with me! 

88 



HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS 

DEAR Uncle Jim, this garden ground 
That now you smoke your pipe around, 
Has seen immortal actions done 
And valiant battles lost and won. 

Here we had best on tip-toe tread, 
While I for safety march ahead, 
For this is that enchanted ground 
Where all who loiter slumber sound. 

Here is the sea, here is the sand, 
Here is simple Shepherd's Land, 
Here are the fairy hollyhocks, 
And there are Ali B aba's rocks. 

But yonder, see! apart and high, 
Frozen Siberia lies ; where I , 
With Robert Bruce and William Tell, 
Was bound by an enchanter's spell. 



89 



ENVOYS 



TO WILLIE AND HENRIETTA 



i 



F two may read aright 
These rhymes of old delight 
And house and garden play, 
You two, my cousins, and you only, may, 



You in a garden green 
With me were king and queen, 
Were hunter, soldier, tar, 
And all the thousand things that children are. 

Now in the elders' seat 
We rest with quiet feet, 
And from the window-bay 
We watch the children, our successors, play. 

"Time was," the golden head 
Irrevocably said; 
But time which none can bind, 
While flowing fast away, leaves love behind. 



93 



TO MY MOTHER 

YOU too, my mother, read my rhymes 
For love of unforgotten times, 
And you may chance to hear once more 
The little feet along the floor. 



94 



TO AUNTIE 

/^HIEF of our aunts — not only I, 
But all your dozen of nurslings cry 

What did the other children do? 

And what were childhood, wanting you? 



95 



TO MINNIE 

THE red room with the giant bed 
Where none but elders laid their head. 
The little room where you and I 
Did for awhile together lie 
And, simple suitor, I your hand 
In decent marriage did demand; 
The great day nursery, best of all, 
With pictures pasted on the wall 
And leaves upon the blind — 
A pleasant room wherein to wake 
And hear the leafy garden shake 
And rustle in the wind — 
And pleasant there to lie in bed 
And see the pictures overhead — 
The wars about Sebastopol, 
The grinning guns along the wall, 
The daring escalade, 
The plunging ships, the bleating sheep, 
The happy children ankle-deep 
And laughing as they wade: 
All these are vanished clean away, 
And the old manse is changed to-day; 
96 



It wears an altered face 
And shields a stranger race. 
The river, on from mill to mill, 
Flows past our childhood's garden still 
But ah! we children never more 
Shall watch it from the water-door! 
Below the yew — it still is there — 
Our phantom voices haunt the air 
As we were still at play, 
And I can hear them call and say: 
"How far is it to Babylon?" 

Ah, far enough, my dear, 

Far, far enough from here — 

Yet you have farther gone ! 

"Can I get there by candlelight?" 

So goes the old refrain. 

I do not know — perchance you might 

But only, children, hear it right, 

Ah, never to return again ! 

The eternal dawn, beyond a doubt, 

Shall break on hill and plain, 

And put all stars and candles out 

Ere we be young again. 

To you in distant India, these 

I send across the seas, 

Nor count it far across. 

97 



For which of us forgets 
The Indian cabinets, 

The bones of antelope, the wings of alba- 
tross, 
The pied and painted birds and beans, 
The junks and bangles, beads and screens, 
The gods and sacred bells, 
And the loud-humming, twisted shells! 
The level of the parlour floor 
Was honest, homely, Scottish shore; 
But when we climbed upon a chair, 
Behold the gorgeous East was there! 
Be this a fable; and behold 
Me in the parlour as of old, 
And Minnie just above me set 
In the quaint Indian cabinet! 
Smiling and kind, you grace a shelf 
Too high for me to reach myself. 
Reach down a hand, my dear, and take 
These rhymes for old acquaintance' sake! 



58 



TO MY NAME-CHILD 

SOME day soon this rhyming volume, if 
you learn with proper speed, 
Little Louis Sanchez, will be given you to 

read. 
Then shall you discover, that your name 

was printed down 
By the English printers, long before, in 
London town. 

In the great and busy city where the East 

and West are met, 
All the little letters did the English printer 

set; 
While you thought of nothing, and were still 

too young to play, 
Foreign people thought of you in places far 

away. 

Ay, and while you slept, a baby, over all 

the English lands 
Other little children took the volume in 

their hands; 

99 



Other children questioned, in their homes 

across the seas: 
Who was little Louis, won't you tell us, 

mother, please? 

Now that you have spelt your lesson, lay it 

down and go and play, 
Seeking shells and seaweed on the sands of 

Monterey, 
Watching all the mighty whalebones, lying 

buried by the breeze, 
Tiny sandy-pipers, and the huge Pacific seas. 

And remember in your playing, as the sea- 
fog rolls to you, 

Long ere you could read it, how I told you 
what to do; 

And that while you thought of no one, 
nearly half the world away 

Some one thought of Louis on the beach of 
Monterey ! 



IOO 



TO ANY READER 

AS from the house your mother sees 
You playing round the garden trees, 
So you may see, if you will look 
Through the windows of this book, 
Another child, far, far away, 
And in another garden, play. 
But do not think you can at all, 
By knocking on the window, call 
That child to hear you. He intent 
Is all on his play-business bent. 
He does not hear; he will not look, 
Nor yet be lured out of this book. 
For, long ago, the truth to say, 
He has grown up and gone away, 
And it is but a child of air 
That lingers in the garden there. 



ioi 



PART II 



UNDERWOODS 



Of all my verse, like not a single line; 
But like my title, for it is not mine. 
That title from a better man I stole: 
Ah, how much better, had I stoVn the whole! 



DEDICATION 

rHERE are men and classes of men that 
stand above the common herd: the soldier , 
the sailor and the shepherd not unjrequenily; 
the artist rarely; rarelier still, the clergyman; 
the physician almost as a rule. He is the 
flower {such as it is) of our civilisation; and 
when that stage of man is done with, and only 
remembered to he marvelled at in history, he 
will be thought to have shared as little as any 
in the defects of the period, and most notably 
exhibited the virtues of the race. Generosity 
he has, such as is possible to those who practise 
an art, never to those who drive a trade; dis- 
cretion, tested by a hundred secrets; tact, tried 
in a thousand embarrassments; and what are 
more important, Heraclean cheerfulness and 
courage. So it is that he brings air and 
cheer into the sickroom, and often enough, 
though not so often as he wishes, brings 
healing. 

Gratitude is but a lame sentiment; thanks, 
when they are expressed, are often more 
5 



embarrassing than welcome; and yet I must 
set forth mine to a few out of many doctors 
who have brought me comfort and help: to 
Dr. Willey of San Francisco, whose kindness 
to a stranger it must he as grateful to him, as 
it is touching to me, to remember; to Dr. Karl 
Ruedi of Davos, the good genius of the English 
in his frosty mountains; to Dr. Herbert of 
Paris, whom I knew only for a week, and to 
Dr. Caissot of Montpellier, whom I knew 
only for ten days, and who have yet written 
their names deeply in my memory; to Dr. 
Brandt of Royal; to Dr. Wakefield of Nice; 
to Dr. Chepnell, whose visits make it a pleasure 
to be ill; to Dr. Horace Dobell, so wise in 
counsel; to Sir Andrew Clark, so unwearied 
in kindness; and to that wise youth, my uncle, 
Dr. Balfour. 

I forget as many as I remember; and I ask 
both to pardon me, these for silence, those for 
inadequate speech. But one name I have 
kept on purpose to the last, because it is a 
household word with me, and because if I 
had not received favours from so many hands 
and in so many quarters of the world, it 
should have stood upon this page alone: that 
of my friend Thomas Bodley Scott of Bourne- 
6 



mouth. Will he accept this, although shared 
among so many, jor a dedication to himself? 
and when next my ill-fortune {which has thus 
its -pleasant side) brings him hurrying to me 
when he would fain sit down to meat or lie 
down to rest, will he care to remember that he 
takes this trouble for one who is not fool 
enough to be ungrateful? 

R. L. 5. 
Skerryvore, 

Bournemouth, 



NOTE 

rHE human conscience has fled of late 
the troublesome domain of conduct for 
what I should have supposed to he the less 
congenial field of art: there she may now he 
said to rage, and with special severity in all 
that touches dialect; so that in every novel the 
letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the 
reader wearied, to commemorate shades of 
mispronunciation. Now spelling is an art 
of great difficulty in my eyes, and I am 
inclined to lean upon the printer, even in 
common practice, rather than to venture 
abroad upon new quests. And the Scots 
tongue has an orthography of its own, lacking 
neither "authority nor author." Yet the 
temptation is great to lend a little guidance to 
the bewildered Englishman. Some simple 
phonetic artifice might defend your verses 
from barbarous mishandling, and yet not 
injure any vested interest. So it seems at 
first; but there are rocks ahead. Thus, if I 
wish the diphthong ou to have its proper 
9 



value, I may write oor instead of our; many 
have done so and lived, and the pillars of the 
universe remained unshaken. But if I did 
so, and came presently to doun, which is the 
classical Scots spelling of the English down, 
/ should begin to feel uneasy; and if I went 
on a little farther, and came to a classical 
Scots word, like stour or dour or clour, / 
should know precisely where I was — that is 
to say, that I was out of sight of land on those 
high seas of spelling reform in which so many 
strong swimmers have toiled vainly. To some 
the situation is exhilarating; as for me, I give 
one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise 
at which I have arrived is indefensible, and 
I have no thought of trying to defend it. As 
I have stuck for the most part to the proper 
spelling, I append a table of some common 
vowel sounds which no one need consult; and 
just to prove that I belong to my age and have 
in me the stuff of a reformer, I have used 
modification marks throughout. Thus I can 
tell myself, not without pride, that I have 
added a fresh stumbling-block for English 
readers, and to a page of print in my native 
tongue, have lent a new uncouthness. Sed 
non nobis. 



10 



/ note again, that among our new dialec- 
ticians, the heal habitat of every dialect is given 
to the square mile. I could not emulate this 
nicety ij I desired; for I simply wrote my 
Scots as well as I was able, not caring if it 
hailed from Lauderdale or Angus, from the 
M earns or Galloway; if I had ever heard a 
good word, I used it without shame; and when 
Scots was lacking, or the rhyme jibbed, I was 
glad {like my betters) to fall back on English. 
For all that, I own to a friendly feeling for 
the tongue of Fergusson and of Sir Walter, 
both Edinburgh men; and I confess that Bums 
has always sounded in my ear like something 
-partly foreign. And indeed I am from the 
Lothians myself; it is there I heard the lan- 
guage spoken about my childhood; and it is 
in the drawling Lothian voice that I repeat 
it to myself. Let the precisians call my 
speech that of the Lothians. And if it be not 
pure, alas ! what matters it ? The day draws 
near when this illustrious and malleable 
tongue shall be quite forgotten; and Burns s 
Ayrshire, and Dr. Macdonald's Aberdeen- 
awa, and Scott's brave, metropolitan utter- 
ance will be all equally the ghosts of speech. 
Till then I would love to have my hour as a 
ii 



native Maker, and be read by my own country- 
folk in our own dying language: an ambition 
surely rather of the heart than of the head, so 
restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, 
so parochial in bounds of space. 



12 



BOOK I 

IN ENGLISH 



I 

ENVOY 

GO, little book, and wish to all 
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, 
A bin of wine, a spice of wit, 
A house with lawns enclosing it, 
A living river by the door, 
A nightingale in the sycamore! 



IS 



II 

A SONG OF THE ROAD 

THE gauger walked with willing foot, 
And aye the gauger played the flute; 
And what should Master Gauger play 
But Over the hills and far away? 

Whene'er I buckle on my pack 
And foot it gaily in the track, 

pleasant gauger, long since dead, 

1 hear you fluting on ahead. 

You go with me the self-same way — 
The self-same air for me you play; 
For I do think and so do you 
It is the tune to travel to. 

For who would gravely set his face 
To go to this or t'other place? 
There's nothing under heav'n so blue 
That's fairly worth the travelling to. 

16 



On every hand the roads begin, 
And people walk with zeal therein; 
But wheresoe'r the highways tend, 
Be sure there's nothing at the end. 

Then follow you, wherever hie 
The travelling mountains of the sky. 
Or let the streams in civil mode 
Direct your choice upon a road; 

For one and all, or high or low, 
Will lead you where you wish to go; 
And one and all go night and day 
Over the hills and jar away ! 

Forest of Montargis, 1878 



r7 



Ill 

THE CANOE SPEAKS 

ON the great streams the ships may go 
About men's business to and fro. 
But I, the egg-shell pinnace, sleep 
On crystal waters ankle-deep : 
I, whose diminutive design, 
Of sweeter cedar, pithier pine, 
Is fashioned on so frail a mould, 
A hand may launch, a hand withhold: 
I, rather, with the leaping trout 
Wind, among lilies, in and out; 
I, the unnamed, inviolate, 
Green, rustic rivers, navigate; 
My dipping paddie scarcely shakes 
The berry in the bramble-brakes; 
Still forth on my green way I wend 
Beside the cottage garden-end; 
And by the nested angler fare, 
And take the lovers unaware. 
By willow wood and water-wheel 
Speedily fleets my touching keel; 
By all retired and shady spots 
18 



Where prosper dim forget-me-nots; 
By meadows where at afternoon 
The growing maidens troop in June 
To loose their girdles on the grass. 
Ah! speedier than before the glass 
The backward toilet goes ; and swift 
As swallows quiver, robe and shift 
And the rough country stockings lie 
Around each young divinity. 
When, following the recondite brook, 
Sudden upon this scene I look, 
And light with unfamiliar face 
On chaste Diana's bathing-place, 
Loud ring the hills about and all 
The shallows are abandoned. . . . 



19 



IV 

IT is the season now to go 
About the country high and low, 
Among the lilacs hand in hand, 
And two by two in fairy land. 

The brooding boy, the sighing maid, 
Wholly fain and half afraid, 
Now meet along the hazel'd brook 
To pass and linger, pause and look. 

A year ago, and blithely paired, 

Their rough-and-tumble play they shared; 

They kissed and quarrelled, laughed and 

cried, 
A year ago at Eastertide. 

With bursting heart, with fiery face, 

She strove against him in the race; 

He unabashed her garter saw, 

That now would touch her skirts with awe. 

Now by the stile ablaze she stops, 
And his demurer eyes he drops; 
Now they exchange averted sighs 
Or stand and marry silent eyes. 



And he to her a hero is 
And sweeter she than primroses; 
Their common silence dearer far 
Than nightingale and mavis are. 

Now when they sever wedded hands, 
Joy trembles in their bosom-strands, 
And lovely laughter leaps and falls 
Upon their lips in madrigals. 



21 



V 

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL 

A NAKED house, a naked moor, 
*~1 A shivering -pool before the door, 
A garden bare of flowers and fruit 
And poplars at the garden foot : 
Such is the place that I live in, 
Bleak without and bare within. 

Yet shall your ragged moor receive 
The incomparable pomp of eve, 
And the cold glories of the dawn 
Behind your shivering trees be drawn; 
And when the wind from place to place 
Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase. 
Your garden gloom and gleam again, 
With leaping sun, with glancing rain 
Here shall the wizard moon ascend 
The heavens, in the crimson end 
Of day's declining splendour; here 
The army of the stars appear. 
The neighbour hollows dry or wet, 
Spring shall with tender flowers beset; 

22 



And oft the morning muser see 
Larks rising from the broomy lea, 
And every fairy wheel and thread 
Of cobweb dew-bediamonded. 
When daisies go, shall winter time 
Silver the simple grass with rime; 
Autumnal frosts enchant the pool 
And make the cart-ruts beautiful ; 
And when snow-bright the moor expands, 
How shall your children clap their hands! 
To make this earth, our hermitage, 
A cheerful and a changeful page, 
God's bright and intricate device 
Of days and seasons doth suffice. 



23 



VI 
A VISIT FROM THE SEA 

FAR from the loud sea beaches 
Where he goes fishing and crying, 
Here in the inland garden 
Why is the sea-gull flying? 

Here are no fish to dive for; 

Here is the corn and lea; 
Here are the green trees rustling. 

Hie away home to sea ! 

Fresh is the river water 
And quiet among the rushes; 

This is no home for the sea-gull 
But for the rooks and thrushes. 

Pity the bird that has wandered! 

Pity the sailor ashore! 
Hurry him home to the ocean, 

Let him come here no more! 
24 



High on the sea-cliff ledges 

The white gulls are trooping and crying 5 
Here among rooks and roses, 

Why is the sea-gull flying? 



25 



VII 
TO A GARDENER 

FRIEND, in my mountain-side demesne, 
My plain-beholding, rosy, green 
And linnet-haunted garden-ground, 
Let still the esculents abound. 
Let first the onion flourish there, 
Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, 
Wine-scented and poetic soul 
Of the capacious salad bowl. 
Let thyme the mountaineer (to dress 
The tinier birds) and wading cress, 
The lover of the shallow brook, 
From all my plots and borders look. 
Nor crisp and ruddy radish, nor 
Pease-cods for the child's pinafore 
Be lacking; nor of salad clan 
The last and least that ever ran 
About great nature's garden-beds. 
Nor thence be missed the speary heads 
Of artichoke; nor thence the bean 
That gathered innocent and green 
Outsavours the belauded pea. 
26 



These tend, I prithee; and for me, 
Thy most long-suffering master, bring 
In April, when the linnets sing 
And the days lengthen more and more, 
At sundown to the garden door. 
And I, being provided thus, 
Shall, with superb asparagus, 
A book, a taper, and a cup 
Of country wine, divinely sup. 

La Solitude, Hyeres. 



27 



VIII 

TO MINNIE 

(JVitb a hand-glass) 

A PICTURE-FRAME for you to fill, 
A paltry setting for your face, 
A thing that has no worth until 

You lend it something of your grace, 

I send (unhappy I that sing 
Laid by awhile upon the shelf) 

Because I would not send a thing 
Less charming than you are yourself. 

And happier than I, alas! 

(Dumb thing, I envy its delight) 
'T will wish you well, the looking-glass, 

And look you in the face to-night. 



IX 
TO K. DE M. 

A LOVER of the moorland bare, 
And honest country winds, you were ; 
The silver-skimming rain you took; 
And loved the floodings of the brook, 
Dew, frost and mountains, fire and seas, 
Tumultuary silences, 
Winds that in darkness fifed a tune, 
And the high-riding virgin moon. 

And as the berry, pale and sharp, 
Springs on some ditch's counterscarp 
In our ungenial, native north — 
You put your frosted wildings forth, 
And on the heath, afar from man, 
A strong and bitter virgin ran. 

The berry ripened keeps the rude 
And racy flavour of the wood. 
And you that loved the empty plain 
All redolent of wind and rain, 
29 



Around you still the curlew sings — 
The freshness of the weather clings 
The maiden jewels of the rain 
Sit in your dabbled locks again. 



30 



TO N. V. DE G. S. 

THE unfathomable sea, and time, and 
tears, 
The deeds of heroes and the crimes of kings 
Dispart us; and the river of events 
Has, for an age of years, to east and west 
More widely borne our cradles. Thou to me 
Art foreign, as when seamen at the dawn 
Descry a land far off and know not which. 
So I approach uncertain; so I cruise 
Round thy mysterious islet, and behold 
Surf and great mountains and loud river- 
bars, 
And from the shore hear inland voices call. 
Strange is the seaman's heart; he hopes, he 

fears; 
Draws closer and sweeps wider from that 

coast ; 
Last, his rent sail refits, and to the deep 
His shattered prow uncomforted puts back. 
Yet as he goes he ponders at the helm 
31 



Of that bright island; where he feared to 

touch, 
His spirit readventures; and for years, 
Where by his wife he slumbers safe at home, 
Thoughts of that land revisit him; he sees 
The eternal mountains beckon, and awakes 
Yearning for that far home that might have 

been. 



3* 



XI 
TO WILL. H. LOW 

YOUTH now flees on feathered foot. 
Faint and fainter sounds the flute, 
Rarer songs of gods; and still 
Somewhere on the sunny hill, 
Or along the winding stream, 
Through the willows, flits a dream; 
Flits, but shows a smiling face, 
Flees, but with so quaint a grace, 
None can choose to stay at home, 
All must follow, all must roam. 

This is unborn beauty: she 
Now in air floats high and free, 
Takes the sun and breaks the blue; — 
Late with stooping pinion flew 
Raking hedgerow trees, and wet 
Her wing in silver streams, and set 
Shining foot on temple roof: 
Now again she flies aloof, 
Coasting mountain clouds and kiss't 
By the evening's amethyst. 
33 



In wet wood and miry lane, 
Still we pant and pound in vain; 
Still with leaden foot we chase 
Waning pinion, fainting face; 
Still with grey hair we stumble on, 
Till, behold, the vision gone! 
Where hath fleeting beauty led? 
To the doorway of the dead. 
Life is over, life was gay : 
We have come the primrose way. 



34 



XII 
TO MRS. WILL. H. LOW 

EVEN in the bluest noonday of July, 
There could not run the smallest breath 

of wind 
But all the quarter sounded like a wood; 
And in the chequered silence and above 
The hum of city cabs that sought the Bois, 
Suburban ashes shivered into song. 
A patter and a chatter and a chirp 
And a long dying hiss — it was as though 
Starched old brocaded dames through all 

the house 
Had trailed a strident skirt, or the whole sky 
Even in a wink had over-brimmed in rain. 
Hark, in these shady parlours, how it talks 
Of the near autumn, how the smitten ash 
Trembles and augurs floods ! O not too long 
In these inconstant latitudes delay, 
O not too late from the unbeloved north 
Trim your escape! For soon shall this low 

roof 

35 



Resound indeed with rain, soon shall your 

eyes 
Search the foul garden, search the darkened 

rooms, 
Nor find one jewel but the blazing log. 

12 Rue Vernier, Paris. 



36 



XIII 

TO H. F. BROWN 

(Written during a dangerous sickness) 

IS IT and wait a pair of oars 
On cis-Elysian river-shores. 
Where the immortal dead have sate, 
'T is mine to sit and meditate; 
To re-ascend life's rivulet, 
Without remorse, without regret; 
And sing my Alma Genetrix 
Among the willows of the Styx. 

And lo, as my serener soul 
Did these unhappy shores patrol, 
And wait with an attentive ear 
The coming of the gondolier, 
Your fire-surviving roll I took, 
Your spirited and happy book; 1 

x Life on the Lagoons, by H. F. Brown, originally 
burned in the fire at Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench 
& Co.'s. 

37 



Whereon, despite my frowning fate, 
It did my soul so recreate 
That all my fancies fled away 
On a Venetian holiday. 

Now, thanks to your triumphant care, 

Your pages clear as April air, 

The sails, the bells, the birds, I know, 

And the far-off Friulan snow; 

The land and sea, the sun and shade, 

And the blue even lamp-inlaid. 

For this, for these, for all, O friend, 

For your whole book from end to end — 

For Paron Piero's muttonham — 

I your defaulting debtor am. 

Perchance, reviving, yet may I 
To your sea-paven city hie, 
And in a fetye, some day yet 
Light at your pipe my cigarette. 



38 



XIV 
TO ANDREW LANG 

DEAR Andrew, with the brindled hair, 
Who glory to have thrown in air, 
High over arm, the trembling reed, 
By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed: 
An equal craft of hand you show 
The pen to guide, the fly to throw: 
I count you happy starred : for God, 
When he with inkpot and with rod 
Endowed you, bade your fortune lead 
Forever by the crooks of Tweed, 
Forever by the woods of song 
And lands that to the Muse belong; 
Or if in peopled streets, or in 
The abhorred pedantic sanhedrim, 
It should be yours to wander, still 
Airs of the morn, airs of the hill, 
The plovery Forest and the seas 
That break about the Hebrides, 
Should follow over field and plain 
And find you at the window pane; 
39 



And you again see hill and peel, 

And the bright springs gush at your heel. 

So went the fiat forth, and so 

Garrulous like a brook you go, 

With sound of happy mirth and sheen 

Of daylight — whether by the green 

You fare that moment, or the grey; 

Whether you dwell in March or May; 

Or whether treat of reels and rods 

Or of the old unhappy gods : 

Still like a brook your page has shone, 

And your ink sings of Helicon. 



XV 
ET TU IN ARCADIA VIXISTI 

(TO R. A. M. S.) 

IN ancient tales, O friend, thy spirit 
dwelt; 

There, from of old, thy childhood passed; 
and there 

High expectation, high delights and deeds, 

Thy fluttering heart with hope and terror 
moved. 

And thou hast heard of yore the Blatant 
Beast, 

And Roland's horn, and that war-scattering 
shout 

Of all-unarmed Achilles, aegis-crowned. 

And perilous lands thou sawest, sounding 
shores 

And seas and forests drear, island and dale 

And mountain dark. For thou with Tris- 
tram rod'st 

Or Bedevere, in farthest Lyonesse. 

Thou hadst a booth in Samarcand, whereat 
41 



Side-looking Magians trafficked; thence, by 

night, 
An Afreet snatched thee, and with wings 

upbore 
Beyond the Aral mount; or, hoping gain, 
Thou, with a jar of money, didst embark, 
For Balsorah, by sea. But chiefly thou 
In that clear air took'st life; in Arcady 
The haunted, land of song; and by the wells 
Where most the gods frequent. There 

Chiron old, 
In the Pelethronian antre, taught thee lore: 
The plants, he taught, and by the shining 

stars 
In forests dim to steer. There hast thou 

seen 
Immortal Pan dance secret in a glade, 
And, dancing, roll his eyes; these, where 

they fell, 
Shed glee, and through the congregated oaks 
A flying horror winged; while all the earth 
To the god's pregnant footing thrilled 

within. 
Or whiles, beside the sobbing stream, he 

breathed, 
In his clutched pipe, unformed and wizard 

strains, 

42 



Divine yet brutal; which the forest heard, 
And thou, with awe; and far upon the plain 
The unthinking ploughman started and 
gave ear. 

Now things there are that, upon him who 

sees, 
A strong vocation lay; and strains there are 
That whoso hears shall hear for evermore. 
For evermore thou hear'st immortal Pan 
And those melodious godheads, ever young 
And ever quiring, on the mountains old. 

What was this earth, child of the gods, to 

thee? 
Forth from thy dreamland thou, a dreamer, 

cam'st, 
And in thine ears the olden music rang, 
And in thy mind the doings of the dead, 
And those heroic ages long forgot. 
To a so fallen earth, alas! too late. 
Alas! in evil days, thy steps return, 
To list at noon for nightingales, to grow 
A dweller on the beach till Argo come 
That came long since, a lingerer by the 

pool 
Where that desired angel bathes no more. 

43 



As when the Indian to Dakota comes, 
Or farthest Idaho, and where he dwelt, 
He with his clan, a humming city finds; 
Thereon awhile, amazed, he stares, and then 
To right and leftward, like a questing dog, 
Seeks first the ancestral altars, then the 

hearth 
Long cold with rains, and where old terror 

lodged, 
And where the dead. So thee undying 

Hope, 
With all her pack, hunts screaming through 

the years: 
Here, there, thou fleeest; but nor here nor 

there 
The pleasant gods abide, the glory dwells. 

That, that was not Apollo, not the god. 
This was not Venus, though she Venus 

seemed 
A moment. And though fair yon river 

move, 
She, all the way, from disenchanted fount 
To seas unhallowed runs; the gods forsook 
Long since her trembling rushes; from her 

plains 
Disconsolate, long since adventure fled; 

44 



And now although the inviting river flows, 
And every poplared cape, and every bend 
Or willowy islet, win upon thy soul 
And to thy hopeful shallop whisper speed; 
Yet hope not thou at all; hope is no more; 
And O, long since the golden groves are 

dead, 
The faery cities vanished from the land ! 



45 



XVI 
TO W. E. HENLEY 

THE year runs through her phases; rain 
and sun, 

Springtime and summer pass; winter suc- 
ceeds ; 

But one pale season rules the house of death. 

Cold falls the imprisoned daylight; fell 
disease 

By each lean pallet squats, and pain and 
sleep 

Toss gaping on the pillows. 

But O thou! 

Uprise and take thy pipe. Bid music flow, 
Strains by good thoughts attended, like the 

spring 
The swallows follow over land and sea. 
Pain sleeps at once; at once, with open eyes, 
Dozing despair awakes. The shepherd sees 
His flock come bleating home; the seaman 

hears 

46 



Once more the cordage rattle. Airs of 

home ! 
Youth, love and roses blossom; the gaunt 

ward 
Dislimns and disappears, and, opening out, 
Shows brooks and forests, and the blue 

beyond 
Of mountains. 

Small the pipe; but O! do thou, 
Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein 
The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick, 
These dying, sound the triumph over death. 
Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes 

a joy 
Unknown before, in dying; for each knows 
A hero dies with him — though unfulfilled 
Yet conquering truly — and not dies in 

vain. 

So is pain cheered, death comforted; the 

house 
Of sorrows smiles to listen. Once again — 
O thou, Orpheus and Heracles, the bard 
And the deliverer, touch the stops again! 



47 



XVII 
HENRY JAMES 

WHO comes to-night? We ope the 
doors in vain. 
Who comes? My bursting walls, can you 

contain 
The presences that now together throng 
Your narrow entry, as with flowers and 

song, 
As with the air of life, the breath of talk? 
Lo, how these fair immaculate women walk 
Behind their jocund maker; and we see 
Slighted De Mauves, and that far different 

she, 
Gressie, the trivial sphynx; and to our feast 
Daisy and Barb and Chancellor (she not 

least !) 
With all their silken, all their airy kin, 
Do like unbidden angels enter in. 
But he, attended by these shining names, 
Comes (best of all) himself — our welcome 

James. 

48 



XVIII 
THE MIRROR SPEAKS 

WHERE the bells peal far at sea 
Cunning fingers fashioned me. 
There on palace walls I hung 
While that Consuelo sung; 
But I heard, though I listened well, 
Never a note, never a trill, 
Never a beat of the chiming bell. 
There I hung and looked, and there 
In my grey face, faces fair 
Shone from under shining hair. 
Well I saw the poising head, 
But the lips moved and nothing said; 
And when lights were in the hall, 
Silent moved the dancers all. 

So awhile I glowed, and then 
Fell on dusty days and men; 
Long I slumbered packed in straw, 
Long I none but dealers saw; 
Till before my silent eye 
One that sees came passing by. 

49 



Now with an outlandish grace, 
To the sparkling fire I face 
In the blue room at Skerry vore; 
Where I wait until the door 
Open, and the Prince of Men, 
Henry James, shall come again. 



So 



XIX 
KATHARINE 

WE see you as we see a face 
That trembles in a forest place 
Upon the mirror of a pool 
Forever quiet, clear and cool; 
And in the wayward glass, appears 
To hover between smiles and tears, 
Elfin and human, airy and true, 
And backed by the reflected blue. 



5i 



XX 
TO F. J. S. 

I READ, dear friend, in your dear face 
Your life's tale told with perfect grace; 
The river of your life, I trace 
Up the sun-chequered, devious bed 
To the far-distant fountain-head. 

Not one quick beat of your warm heart, 
Nor thought that came to you apart, 
Pleasure nor pity, love nor pain 
Nor sorrow, has gone by in vain; 

But as some lone, wood-wandering child 
Brings home with him at evening mild 
The thorns and flowers of all the wild, 
From your whole life, O fair and true 
Your flowers and thorns you bring with you! 



52 



XXI 
REQUIEM 

UNDER the wide and starry sky 5 
Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die, 
And I laid me down with a will. 

This be the verse you grave for me: 
Here he lies where he longed to he; 
Home is the sailor, home from sea, 
And the hunter home from the hill. 



53 



XXII 
THE CELESTIAL SURGEON 

IF I have faltered more or less 
In my great task of happiness; 
If I have moved among my race 
And shown no glorious morning face; 
If beams from happy human eyes 
Have moved me not ; if morning skies, 
Books, and my food, and summer rain 
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain : — ■ 
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take 
And stab my spirit broad awake; 
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, 
Choose thou, before that spirit die 
A piercing pain, a killing sin, 
And to my dead heart run them in ! 



54 



XXIII 
OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS 

OUT of the sun, out of the blast, 
Out of the world, alone I passed 
Across the moor and through the wood 
To where the monastery stood. 
There neither lute nor breathing fife, 
Nor rumour of the world of life, 
Nor confidences low and dear, 
Shall strike the meditative ear. 
Aloof, unhelpful, and unkind, 
The prisoners of the iron mind, 
Where nothing speaks except the hell 
The unfraternal brothers dwell. 
Poor passionate men, still clothed afresh 
With agonising folds of flesh ; 
Whom the clear eyes solicit still 
To some bold output of the will, 
While fairy Fancy far before 
And musing Memory-Hold-the-door 
55 



Now to heroic death invite 
And now uncurtain fresh delight: 
O, little boots it thus to dwell 
On the remote unneighboured hill ! 

O to be up and doing, O 
Unfearing and unshamed to go 
In all the uproar and the press 
About my human business ! 
My undissuaded heart I hear 
Whisper courage in my ear. 
With voiceless calls, the ancient earth 
Summons me to a daily birth. 
Thou, O my love, ye, O my friends — 
The gist of life, the end of ends — 
To laugh, to love, to live, to die, 
Ye call me by the ear and eye ! 

Forth from the casemate, on the plain 
Where honour has the world to gain, 
Pour forth and bravely do your part, 
O knights of the unshielded heart! 
Forth and forever forward ! — out 
From prudent turret and redoubt, 
And in the mellay charge amain, 
To fall but yet to rise again ! 
56 



Captive? ah, still, to honour bright, 
A captive soldier of the right ! 
Or free and fighting, good with ill? 
Unconquering but unconquered still ! 

And ye, O brethren, what if God, 

When from Heav'n's top he spies abroad, 

And sees on this tormented stage 

The noble war of mankind rage: 

What if his vivifying eye, 

O monks, should pass your corner by? 

For still the Lord is Lord of might ; 
In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight; 
The plough, the spear, the laden barks, 
The field, the founded city, marks; 
He marks the smiler of the streets, 
The singer upon garden seats; 
He sees the climber in the rocks ; 
To him, the shepherd folds his flocks. 
For those he loves that underprop 
With daily virtues Heaven's top, 
And bear the falling sky with ease, 
Unfrowning caryatides. 
Those he approves that ply the trade, 
That rock the child, that wed the maid, 
57 



That with weak virtues, weaker hands, 
Sow gladness on the peopled lands, 
And still with laughter, song and shout, 
Spin the great wheel of earth about. 

But ye? — O ye who linger still 
Here in your fortress on the hill, 
With placid face, with tranquil breath, 
The unsought volunteers of death, 
Our cheerful General on high 
With careless looks may pass you by. 



58 



XXIV 

NOT yet, my soul, these friendly fields 
desert, 
Where thou with grass, and rivers, and the 

breeze 
And the bright face of day, thy dalliance 

hadst; 
Where to thine ear first sang the enraptured 

birds; 
Where love and thou that lasting bargain 

made. 
The ship rides trimmed, and from the 

eternal shore 
Thou hearest airy voices; but not yet 
Depart, my soul, not yet awhile depart. 

Freedom is far, rest far. Thou art with life 
Too closely woven, nerve with nerve 

intwined; 
Service still craving service, love for love, 
Love for dear love, still suppliant with tears. 
Alas, not yet thy human task is done ! 
A bond at birth is forged; a debt doth lie 

59 



Immortal on mortality. It grows — 
By vast rebound it grows, unceasing growth; 
Gift upon gift, alms upon alms, upreared, 
From man, from God, from nature, till the 

soul 
At that so huge indulgence stands amazed. 

Leave not, my soul, the unfoughten field, 

nor leave 
Thy debts dishonoured, nor thy place desert 
Without due service rendered. For thy life, 
Up, spirit, and defend that fort of clay, 
Thy body, now beleaguered; whether soon 
Or late she fall; whether to-day thy friends 
Bewail thee dead, or, after years, a man 
Grown old in honour and the friend of 

peace. 
Contend, my soul, for moments and for 

hours ; 
Each is with service pregnant; each re- 
claimed 
Is as a kingdom conquered, where to reign. 
As when a captain rallies to the fight 
His scattered legions, and beats ruin back, 
He, on the field, encamps, well pleased in 

mind. 
Yet surely him shall fortune overtake, 
60 



Him smite in turn, headlong his ensigns 

drive; 
And that dear land, now safe, to-morrow 

fall. 
But he, unthinking, in the present good 
Solely delights, and all the camps rejoice. 



XXV 

IT is not yours, O mother, to complain, 
Not, mother, yours to weep, 
Though nevermore your son again 
Shall to your bosom creep, 
Though nevermore again you watch your 
baby sleep. 

Though in the greener paths of earth, 

Mother and child, no more 
We wander; and no more the birth 

Of me whom once you bore, 

Seems still the brave reward that once it 
seemed of yore; 

Though as all passes, day and night, 

The seasons and the years, 
From you, O mother, this delight, 
This also disappears — 
Some profit yet survives of all your pangs 
and tears, 

62 



The child, the seed, the grain of corn, 

The acorn on the hill, 
Each for some separate end is born 

In season fit, and still 

Each must in strength arise to work the 
almighty will. 

So from the hearth the children flee, 

By that almighty hand 
Austerely led; so one by sea 

Goes forth, and one by land; 

Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from 
that command. 

So from the sally each obeys 

The unseen almighty nod; 
So till the ending all their ways 

Blindfolded loth have trod: 

Nor knew their task at all, but were the 
tools of God. 

And as the fervent smith of yore 

Beat out the glowing blade, 
Nor wielded in the front of war 
The weapons that he made, 
But in the tower at home still plied his 
ringing trade; 
63 



So like a sword the son shall roam 

On nobler missions sent; 
And as the smith remained at home 

In peaceful turret pent, 

So sits the while at home the mother well 
content. 



64 



XXVI 

THE SICK CHILD 

Child, f\ MOTHER, lay your hand on 
V^/ my brow! 

mother, mother, where am I now? 
Why is the room so gaunt and 

great? 
Why am I lying awake so late? 

Mother. Fear not at all: the night is still. 

Nothing is here that means you 

ill — 
Nothing but lamps the whole town 

through, 
And never a child awake but you. 

Child. Mother, mother, speak low in my 

ear, 
Some of the things are so great and 

near, 
Some are so small and far away, 

1 have a fear that I cannot say. 

65 



What have I done, and what do I 

fear, 
And why are you crying, mother 

dear? 

Mother. Out in the city, sounds begin 

Thank the kind God, the carts 
come in ! 

An hour or two more and God is so 
kind, 

The day shall be blue in the window- 
blind, 

Then shall my child go sweetly 
asleep, 

And dream of the birds and the 
hills of sheep. 



66 



XXVII 
IN MEMORIAM F. A. S. 

YET, O stricken heart, remember, O 
remember 
How of human days he lived the better part. 
April came to bloom and never dim 
December 
Breathed its killing chills upon the head 
or heart. 

Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, 
a being 
Trod the flowery April blithely for awhile, 
Took his fill of music, joy of thought and 
seeing, 
Came and stayed and went, nor ever 
ceased to smile. 

Came and stayed and went, and now when 
all is finished, 
You alone have crossed the melancholy 
stream, 
Yours the pang, but his, O his, the undi- 
minished 
Undecaying gladness, undeparted dream. 
67 



All that life contains of torture, toil, and 
treason, 
Shame, dishonour, death, to him were but 
a name. 
Here, a boy, he dwelt through all the singing 
season 
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he 
came. 

Davos, 1881. 



6S 



XXVIII 
TO MY FATHER 

PEACE and her huge invasion to these 
shores 
Puts daily home; innumerable sails 
Dawn on the far horizon and draw near; 
Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes 
To our wild coasts, not darkling now, 

approach : 
Not now obscure, since thou and thine art 

there, 
And bright on the lone isle, the foundered 

reef, 
The long, resounding foreland, Pharos 

stands. 

These are thy works, O father, these thy 

crown ; 
Whether on high the air be pure, they shine 
Along the yellowing sunset, and all night 
Among the unnumbered stars of God they 

shine; 
Or whether fogs arise and far and wide 
69 



The low sea-level drown — each finds a 

tongue 
And all night long the tolling bell resounds: 
So shine, so toll, till night be overpast, 
Till the stars vanish, till the sun return, 
And in the haven rides the fleet secure. 

In the first hour, the seaman in his skiff 
Moves through the unmoving bay, to where 

the town 
Its earliest smoke into the air upbreathes 
And the rough hazels climb along the beach. 
To the tugg'd oar the distant echo speaks. 
The ship lies resting, where by reef and 

roost 
Thou and thy lights have led her like a 

child. 

This hast thou done, and I — can I be base? 

I must arise, O father, and to port 

Some lost, complaining seaman pilot home. 



70 



XXIX 
IN THE STATES 

WITH half a heart I wander here 
As from an age gone by 
A brother — yet though young in years, 
An elder brother, I. 

You speak another tongue than mine, 
Though both were English born. 

I towards the night of time decline, 
You mount into the morn. 

Youth shall grow great and strong and free, 

But age must still decay: 
To-morrow for the States — for me, 

England and Yesterday. 

San Francisco. 



n 



XXX 
A PORTRAIT 

I AM a kind of farthing dip, 
Unfriendly to the nose and eyes; 
A blue-behinded ape, I skip 
Upon the trees of Paradise. 

At mankind's feast, I take my place 
In solemn, sanctimonious state, 

And have the air of saying grace 
While I defile the dinner plate. 

I am the "smiler with the knife," 
The battener upon garbage, I — 

Dear Heaven, with such a rancid life, 
Were it not better far to die? 

Yet still, about the human pale, 
I love to scamper, love to race, 

To swing by my irreverent tail 
All over the most holy place; 

72 



And when at length, some golden day, 
The unfailing sportsman, aiming at, 

Shall bag, me — all the world shall say: 
Thank God, and there's an end of that! 



73 



XXXI 

SING clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still, 
Sing truer or no longer sing! 
No more the voice of melancholy Jacques 
To wake a weeping echo in the hill ; 
But as the boy, the pirate of the spring, 
From the green elm a living linnet takes, 
One natural verse recapture — then be still. 



74 



XXXII 
A CAMP 1 

THE bed was made, the room was fit, 
By punctual eve the stars were lit; 
The air was still, the water ran, 
No need was there for maid or man, 
When we put up, my ass and I, 
At God's green caravanserai. 

1 From Travels with a Donkey. 



75 



XXXIII 

THE COUNTRY OF THE 
CAMISARDS 1 



w 



E travelled in the print of olden 
wars, 

Yet all the land was green, 
And love we found, and peace, 
Where fire and war had been. 



They pass and smile, the children of the 
sword — 
No more the sword they wield ; 
And O, how deep the corn 
Along the battlefield! 

1 From Travels with a Donkey. 



76 



XXXIV 
SKERRYVORE 

FOR love of lovely words, and for the 
sake 
Of those, my kinsmen and my countrymen, 
Who early and late in the windy ocean 

toiled 
To plant a star for seamen, where was then 
The surfy haunt of seals and cormorants: 
I, on the lintel of this cot, inscribe 
The name of a strong tower. 



77 



XXXV 
SKERRYVORE: THE PARALLEL 

HERE all is sunny, and when the truant 
gull 
Skims the green level of the lawn, his wing 
Dispetals roses; here the house is framed 
Of kneaded brick and the plumed mountain 

pine, 
Such clay as artists fashion and such wood 
As the tree-climbing urchin breaks. But 

there 
Eternal granite hewn from the living isle 
And dowelled with brute iron, rears a tower 
That from its wet foundation to its crown 
Of glittering glass, stands, in the sweep of 

winds, 
Immovable, immortal, eminent. 



78 



XXXVI 

MY house, I say. But hark to the 
sunny doves 
That make my roof the arena of their loves, 
That gyre about the gable all day long 
And fill the chimneys with their murmurous 

song: 
Our house, they say; and mine, the cat 

declares 
And spreads his golden fleece upon the 

chairs; 
And mine the dog, and rises stiff with wrath 
If any alien foot profane the path. 
So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces, 
Our whilom gardener, called the garden his; 
Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode 
And his late kingdom, only from the road. 



79 



XXXVII 

MY body which my dungeon is, 
And yet my parks and palaces : — 

Which is so great that there I go 
All the day long to and fro, 
And when the night begins to fall 
Throw down my bed and sleep, while all 
The buildings hum with wakefulness — 
Even as a child of savages 
When evening takes her on her way, 
(She having roamed a summer's day 
Along the mountain-sides and scalp) 
Sleeps in an antre of that alp: — 

Which is so broad and high that there, 
As in the topless fields of air, 
My fancy soars like to a kite 
And faints in the blue infinite: — 

Which is so strong, my strongest throes 
And the rough world's besieging blows 
Not break it, and so weak withal, 
Death ebbs and flows in its loose wall 
As the green sea in fishers' nets, 
And tops its topmost parapets: — 
80 



Which is so wholly mine that I 
Can wield its whole artillery, 
And mine so little, that my soul 
Dwells in perpetual control, 
And I but think and speak and do 
As my dead fathers move me to : — 

If this born body of my bones 
The beggared soul so barely owns, 
What money passed from hand to hand, 
What creeping custom of the land, 
What deed of author or assign, 
Can make a house a thing of mine? 



81 



XXXVIII 

SAY not of me that weakly I declined 
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, 
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit, 
To play at home with paper like a child. 
But rather say: In the afternoon of time 
A strenuous family dusted from its lands 
The sand of granite, and beholding far 
Along the sounding coast its pyramids 
And tall memorials catch the dying sun, 
Smiled well content, and to this childish task 
Around the fire addressed its evening hours. 



8a 



BOOK II 
IN SCOTS 



TABLE OF COMMON SCOTTISH 
VOWEL SOUNDS 

ae " 



ai 



= open A as in rare. 



a 

au [ = AW as in law. 

aw) 

ea = open E as in mere, but this with excep- 
tions, as heather = heather, wean = wair* 
lear = lair. 

eel 

ei | = open E as in mere. 

iej 

oa = open O as in more. 

ou = doubled O as in poor. 

ow = OW as in bower. 

u = doubled O as in poor. 

ui or ii before R = (say roughly) open A as in 
rare. 

ui or ii before any other consonant = (say 
roughly) close I as in grin. 

y = open I as in kite. 

i = pretty nearly what you please, much as in 
English. Heaven guide the reader through 
that labyrinth! But in Scots it dodges 
usually from the short I, as in grin, to the 
open E, as in mere. Find and blind, I may 
remark, are pronounced to rhyme with the 
preterite of grin. 

84 



I 

THE MAKER TO POSTERITY 

FAR 'yont amang the years to be 
When a' we think, an' a' we see, 
An' a' we hive, 's been dung ajee 

By time's rouch shouther, 
An' what was richt and wrang for me 

Lies mangled throu'ther, 
It's possible — it's hardly mair — 
That some ane, ripin' after lear — 
Some auld professor or young heir, 

If still there's either — 
May find an' read me, an' be sair 

Perplexed, puir brither! 

"JVhat tongue does your auld bookie speak?" 
He'll spier; an' I, his mou to steik: 
"No bein' fit to write in Greek, 

I wrote in Lallan, 
Dear to my heart as the peat reek, 

Auld as Tantallon. 

"Few spak it then, ari noo there's nane. 
My puir auld sangs lie a' their lane, 
85 



Their sense, that aince was braw an' plain, 

Tint a'thegether, 
Like runes upon a standin' stane 

Amang the heather. 

"But think not you the brae to speel; 
You, tae, maun chow the bitter peel; 
For a' your tear, for a' your skeel, 

Ye' re nane sae lucky; 
An' things are mebbe waur than weel 

For you, my buckie. 

" The bale concern ibaith hens an' eggs, 
Baith books an' writers, stars an' clegs) 
Noo stacbers upon lowsent legs, 

An' wears awa' ; 
The tack o' mankind, near the dregs, 

Rins unco law. 

" Your book, that in some braw new tongue, 
Ye wrote or prentit, preached or sung, 
Will still be just a bairn, an' young 

In fame an' years, 
Whan the hale planet's guts are dung 

About your ears; 

"An' you, sair gruppiri to a spar 
Or whammled wi' some blee^in' star, 
86 



Cryiri to ken whaur deil ye are, 

Hame, France, or Flanders — 

Whang sindry like a railway car 
An' flie in danders" 



87 



II 

ILLE TERRARUM 

FRAE nirly, nippin', Eas'lan' breeze, 
Frae Norlan' snaw, an' haar o' seas, 
Weel happit in your gairden trees, 

A bonny bit, 
Atween the muckle Pentland's knees, 
Secure ye sit. 

Beeches an' aiks entwine their theek, 
An' firs, a stench, auld-farrant clique. 
A' simmer day, your chimleys reek, 

Couthy and bien; 
An' here an' there your windies keek 

Amang the green. 

A pickle plats an' paths an' posies, 
A wheen auld gillyflowers an' roses: 
A ring o' wa's the hale encloses 

Frae sheep or men ; 
An' there the auld housie beeks an' doses, 
A' by her lane. 
88 



The gairdner crooks his weary back 
A' day in the pitaty-track, 
Or mebbe stops awhile to crack 

Wi' Jane the cook, 
Or at some buss, worm-eaten-black, 

To gie a look. 

Frae the high hills the curlew ca's; 
The sheep gang baaing by the wa's; 
Or whiles a clan o' roosty craws 

Cangle thegether; 
The wild bees seek the gairden raws, 

Weariet wi' heather. 

Or in the gloamin' douce an' gray 
The sweet-throat mavis tunes her lay; 
The herd comes linkin' doun the brae; 

An' by degrees 
The muckle siller miine maks way 

Amang the trees. 

Here aft hae I, wi' sober heart, 
For meditation sat apairt, 
When orra loves or kittle art 

Perplexed my mind; 
Here socht a balm for ilka smart 

O' humankind. 
89 



Here aft, weel neukit by my lane, 
Wi' Horace, or perhaps Montaigne, 
The mornin' hours hae come an' gane 

Abune my heid — 
I wadnae gi'en a chucky-stane 

For a' I'd read. 

But noo the auld city, street by street 
An' winter fu' o' snaw an' sleet, 
Awhile shut in my gangrel feet 

An' goavin' mettle; 
Noo is the soopit ingle sweet, 

An' liltin' kettle. 

An' noo the winter winds complain; 
Cauld lies the glaur in ilka lane; 
On draigled hizzie, tautit wean 

An' drucken lads, 
In the mirk nicht, the winter rain 

Dribbles an' blads. 

Whan bugles frae the Castle rock, 
An' beaten drums wi' dowie shock, 
Wauken, at cauld-rife sax o'clock, 

My chitterin' frame, 
I mind me on the kintry cock, 

The kintry hame. 
90 



I mind me on yon bonny bield; 
An' Fancy traivels far afield 
To gaither a' that gairdens yield 

O' sun an' Simmer: 
To hearten up a dowie chield, 

Fancy's the limmer! 



9r 



Ill 

WHEN aince Aprile has fairly come, 
An' birds may bigg in winter's lum, 
An pleisure's spreid for a' and some 

O' whatna state, 
Love, wi' her auld recruitin' drum, 
Than taks the gate. 

The heart plays dunt wi' main an' micht; 
The lasses' een are a' sae bricht, 
Their dresses are sae braw an' ticht, 

The bonny birdies! — 
Puir winter virtue at the sicht 

Gangs heels ower hurdies. 

An' aye as love frae land to land 
Tirls the drum wi' eident hand, 
A' men collecT. at her command, 

Toun-bred or land'art, 
An' follow in a denty band 

Her gaucy standart. 

An' I, wha sang o' rain an' snaw, 
An* weary winter weel awa\ 
92 



Noo busk me in a jacket braw, 

An' tak my place 
I' the ram-stam, harum-scarum raw, 

Wi' smilin' face. 



93 



IV 

A MILE AN' A BITTOCK 

A MILE an' a bittock, a mile or twa, 
Abtine the burn, ayont the law, 
Davie an' Donal' an' Cherlie an' a', 
An' the miine was shinin' clearly! 

Ane went hame wi' the ither, an' then 
The ither went hame wi' the ither twa men, 
An' baith wad return him the service again, 
An' the miine was shinin' clearly! 

The clocks were chappin' in house an' ha', 
Eleeven, twal an' ane an' twa; 
An' the guidman's face was turnt to the wa', 
An' the miine was shinin' clearly ! 

A wind got up frae affa the sea, 
It blew the stars as dear's could be, 
It blew in the een of a' o' the three, 
An' the miine was shinin' clearly! 

Noo, Davie was first to get sleep in his head, 

"The best o' frien's maun twine," he said; 

" I'm weariet, an' here I'm awa' to my bed." 

An' the miine was shinin' clearly! 

94 



Twa o' them walkin' an' crackin' their lane, 
The mornin' licht cam gray an' plain, 
An' the birds they yammert on stick an' 
stane, 
An' the miine was shinin' clearly! 

O years ayont, O years awa', 
My lads, ye'll mind whate'er befa' — 
My lads, ye'll mind on the bield o' the law. 
When the miine was shinin' clearly I 



95 



V 
A LOWDEN SABBATH MORN 

THE clinkum-clank o' Sabbath bells 
Noo to the hoastin' rookery swells, 
Noo faintin' laigh in shady dells, 

Sounds far an' near, 
An' through the simmer kintry tells 
Its tale o' cheer. 

An' noo, to that melodious play, 
A' deidly awn the quiet sway — 
A' ken their solemn holiday, 

Bestial an' human, 
The singin' lintie on the brae, 

The restin' plou'man. 

He, mair than a' the lave o' men, 
His week completit joys to ken; 
Half-dressed, he daunders out an' in, 

Perplext wi' leisure; 
An' his raxt limbs he'll rax again 

Wi' painfu' pleesure. 
96 



The steerin' mither Strang afit 
Noo shoos the bairnies but a bit ; 
Noo cries them ben, their Sinday shiiit 

To scart upon them, 
Or sweeties in their pouch to pit, 

Wi' blessin's on them. 

The lasses, clean frae tap to taes, 
Are busked in crunklin' underclaes; 
The gartened hose, the weel-filled stays, 

The nakit shift, 
A' bleached on bonny greens for days, 

An' white's the drift. 

An' noo to face the kirkward mile: 
The guidman's hat o' dacent style, 
The blackit shoon, we noo maun fyle 

As white's the miller: 
A waefii' peety tae, to spile 

The warth o' siller. 

Our Marg'et, aye sae keen to crack 
Douce-stappin' in the stoury track 
Her emeralt goun a' kiltit back 

Frae snawy coats, 
White-ankled, leads the kirkward pack 

Wi' Dauvit Groats. 
97 



A' thocht ahint, in runkled breeks, 
A* spiled wi' lyin' by for weeks, 
The guidman follows closs, an' cleiks 

The sonsie missis; 
His sarious face at aince bespeaks 

The day that this is. 

And aye an' while we nearer draw 
To whaur the kirkton lies alaw, 
Mair neebours, comin' saft an' slaw 

Frae here an' there, 
The thicker thrang the gate an' caw 

The stour in air. 

But hark! the bells frae nearer clang; 
To rowst the slaw, their sides they bang: 
An' see! black coats a'ready thrang 

The green kirkyaird; 
And at the yett, the chestnuts spang 

That brocht the laird. 

The solemn elders at the plate 

Stand drinkin' deep the pride o' state: 

The practised hands as gash an' great 

As Lords o' Session ; 
The later named, a wee thing blate 
In their expression. 
9 8 



The prentit stanes that mark the deid, 
Wi' lengthened lip, the sarious read; 
Syne wag a moraleesin' heid, 

An* then an' there 
Their hirplin' practice an* their creed 

Try hard to square. 

It's here our Merren lang has lain, 

A wee bewast the table-stane ; 

An' yon's the grave o' Sandy Blane; 

An' further ower, 
The mither's brithers, dacent men! 

Lie a' the fower. 

Here the guidman sail bide awee 
To dwall amang the deid; to see 
Auld faces clear in fancy's e'e; 

Belike to hear 
Auld voices fa'in saft an' slee 

On fancy's ear. 

Thus, on the day o' solemn things, 
The bell that in the steeple swings 
To fauld a scaittered faim'ly rings 

Its walcome screed; 
An' just a wee thing nearer brings 

The quick an' deid. 

99 



But noo the bell is ringin' in; 
To tak their places, folk begin ; 
The minister himsel' will shiine 

Be up the gate, 
Filled fu' wi' clavers about sin 

An' man's estate. 

The t lines are up — French, to be shiire, 
The faithfii' French, an' twa-three mair; 
The auld prezentor, hoastin' sair, 

Wales out the portions, 
An' yirks the time into the air 

Wi' queer contortions. 

Follows the prayer, the readin' next, 
An' than the fisslin' for the text — 
The twa-three last to find it, vext 

But kind o' proud; 
An' than the peppermints are raxed, 

An' southernwood. 

For noo's the time whan pows are seen 
Nid-noddin' like a mandareen; 
When tenty mithers stap a preen 

In sleepin' weans; 
An' nearly half the parochine 

Forget their pains. 



There's just a waukrif twa or three: 
Thrawn commentautors sweer to 'gree, 
Weans glowrin' at the bumlin' bee 

On windie-glasses, 
Or lads that tak a keek a-glee 

At sonsie lasses. 

Himsel', meanwhile, frae whaur he cocks 
An' bobs belaw the soundin'-box, 
The treesures of his words unlocks 

Wi' prodigality, 
An' deals some unco dingin' knocks 

To infidality. 

Wi' sappy unclion, hoo he burkes 
The hopes o' men that trust in works, 
Expound the fau'ts o' ither kirks, 

An' shaws the best o' them 
No muckle better than mere Turks, 

When a's confessed o' them. 

Bethankit! what a bonny creed! 

What mair would ony Christian need ? — 

The braw words rumm'le ower his heid, 

Nor steer the sleeper; 
And in their restin' graves, the deid 

Sleep aye the deeper. 

IOI 



Note. — It may be guessed by some that I 
had a certain parish in my eye, and this makes 
it proper I should add a word of disclamation. 
In my time there have been two ministers in 
that parish. Of the first I have a special reason 
to speak well, even had there been any to think 
ill. The second I have often met in private and 
long (in the due phrase) "sat under" in his 
church, and neither here nor there have I heard 
an unkind or ugly word upon his lips. The 
preacher of the text had thus no original in that 
particular parish; but when I was a boy, he 
might have been observed in many others; he 
was then (like the schoolmaster) abroad; and by 
recent advices, it would seem he has not yet 
entirely disappeared. 



102 



VI 
THE SPAEWIFE 

OI wad like to ken — to the beggar- 
5 wife says I — 
Why chops are guid to brander and nane 

sae guid to fry. 
An' siller, that's sae braw to keep, is brawer 
still to gi'e. 

— It's gey an' easy spierin', says the beggar- 

wife to me. 

O, I wad like to ken — to the beggar-wife 

says I — 
Hoo a' things come to be whaur we find 

them when we try, 
The lasses in their claes an' the fishes in the 

sea. 

— It's gey an' easy spierin', says the beggar- 

wife to me. 



O, I wad like to ken — to the beggar-wife 

says I — 
Why lads are a' to sell an' lasses a' to buy; 
103 



An' naebody for dacency but barely twa or 
three. 

— It's gey an' easy spierin' , says the beggar- 

wife to me. 

O, I wad like to ken — to the beggar-wife 

says I — 
Gin death's as shiire to men as killin' is to 

kye, 
Why God has filled the yearth sae fu' o y 

tasty things to pree. 

— It's gey an' easy spierin , says the beggar- 

wife to me. 

O, I wad like to ken — to the beggar-wife 

says I — 
The reason o' the cause an' the wherefore 

o' the why, 
Wi' mony anither riddle brings the tear into 

my e'e. 

— It's gey an' easy spierin', says the beggar- 

wife to me. 



104 



VII 
THE BLAST — 1875 

ITS rainin'. Weet's the gairden sod, 
Weet the lang roads whaurgangrels plod- 
A maist unceevil thing o' God 

In mid July — 
If ye'll just curse the sneckdraw, dod! 
An' sae wull I ! 

He's a braw place in Heev'n, ye ken, 
An' lea's us puir, forjaskit men 
Clamjamfried in the but and ben 

He ca's the earth — 
A wee bit inconvenient den 

No muckle worth; 

An' whiles, at orra times, keeks out, 
Sees what puir mankind are about; 
An' if He can, I've little doubt, 

Upsets their plans; 
He hates a' mankind, brainch and root, 

And a' that's man's. 



An' whiles, whan they tak heart again, 
An' life i' the sun looks braw an' plain, 
Doun comes a jaw o' droukin' rain 

Upon their honours — 
God sends a spate outower the plain, 

Or mebbe thun'ers. 

Lord safe us, life's an unco thing! 
Simmer an' Winter, Yule an' Spring, 
The damned, dour-heartit seasons bring 

A feck o' trouble. 
I wadnae try't to be a king — 

No, nor for double. 

But since we're in it, willy-nilly, 

We maun be watchfii', wise an' skilly, 

An' no mind ony ither billy, 

Lassie nor God. 
But drink — that's my best counsel till 'e: 

Sae tak the nod. 



106 



VIII 
THE COUNTERBLAST — 1886 

MY bonny man, the warld, it's true, 
Was made for neither me nor you. 
It's just a place to warstle through, 

As Job confessed o't; 

And aye the best that we'll can do 

Is mak the best o't. 

There's rowth o' wrang, I'm free to say: 
The simmer brunt, the winter blae, 
The face of earth a' fyled wi' clay 

An' dour wi' chuckies, 
An' life a rough an' land'art play 

For country buckies. 

An' food's anither name for clart; 
An' beasts an' brambles bite an' scart; 
An' what would we be like, my heart ! 

If bared o' claethin'? 
— Aweel, I cannae mend your cart: 

It's that or naethin'. 
107 



A feck o' folk frae first to last 

Have through this queer experience passed; 

Twa-three, I ken, just damn an' blast 

The hale transaction; 
But twa-three ithers, east an* wast, 

Fand satisfaction. 

Whaur braid the briery muirs expand, 

A waefu' an' a weary land, 

The bumblebees, a gowden band, 

Are blithely hingin' ; 
An' there the canty wanderer fand 

The laverock singin'. 

Trout in the burn grow great as herr'n ; 
The simple sheep can find their fair'n; 
The wind blaws clean about the cairn 

Wi' caller air; 
The muircock an' the barefit bairn 

Are happy there. 

Sic-like the howes o' life to some: 

Green loans whaur they ne'er fash their 

thumb, 
But mark the muckle winds that come, 

Soopin' an' cool. 
Or hear the powrin' burnie drum 

In the shilfa's pool. 

108 



The evil wi* the guid they tak; 
They ca' a gray thing gray, no black; 
To a steigh brae, a stubborn back 

Addressin' daily; 
An' up the rude, unbieldy track 

O' life, gang gaily. 

What you would like's a palace ha\ 
Or Sinday parlour dink an' braw 
Wi' a' things ordered in a raw 

By denty leddies. 
Weel, than, ye cannae hae't: that's a' 

That to be said is. 

An' since at life ye've ta'en the grue, 
An' winnae blithely hirsle through, 
Ye've fund the very thing to do — 

That's to drink speerit; 
An' shiine we'll hear the last o' you — 

An' blithe to hear it! 

The shoon ye coft, the life ye lead, 
Ithers will heir when aince ye're deid; 
They'll heir your tasteless bite o' breid, 

An' find it sappy; 
They'll to your dulefu' house succeed, 

An' there be happy. 
109 



As whan a glum an' fractious wean 
Has sat an' sullened by his lane 
Till, wi' a rowstin' skelp, he's taen 

An' shoo'd to bed — 
The ither bairns a' fa' to play'n', 

As gleg's a gled. 



IX 
THE COUNTERBLAST IRONICAL 

IT's strange that God should fash to frame 
The yearth and lift sae hie, 
An' clean forget to explain the same 
To a gentleman like me. 

They gutsy, donnered ither folk, 
Their weird they weel may dree: 

But why present a pig in a poke 
To a gentleman like me? 

They ither folk their parritch eat 

An' sup their sugared tea; 
But the mind is no to be wyled wi' meat 

Wi' a gentleman like me. 

They ither folk, they court their joes 

At gloamin' on the lea; 
But they're made of a commoner clay, I 
suppose, 

Than a gentleman like me. 



They ither folk, for richt or wrang, 
They suffer, bleed, or dee; 

But a' thir things are an emp'y sang 
To a gentleman like me. 

It's a different thing that I demand, 

Tho' humble as can be — 
A statement fair in my Maker's hand 

To a gentleman like me: 

A clear account writ fair an' broad, 

An' a plain apologie; 
Or the deevil a ceevil word to God 

From a gentleman like me. 



112 



THEIR LAUREATE TO AN 
ACADEMY CLASS DINNER CLUB 

DEAR Thamson class, whaure'er I gang 
It aye comes ower me wi' a spang: 
" Lordsake! they Thamson lads — (deil hang 

Or else Lord mend them) ! — 
An* that wanchancy annual sang 
I ne'er can send them!" 

Straucht, at the name, a trusty tyke, 
My conscience girrs ahint the dyke; 
Straucht on my hinderlands I fyke 

To find a rhyme t' ye; 
Pleased — although mebbe no pleased-like — 

To gie my time t' ye. 

"Weel," an' says you, wi' heavin' breist, 
"Sae far, sae guid, hut what's the neist? 
Yearly we gaither to the feast, 

A' hope fit men — 
Yearly we skelloch 'Hang the beast — 

Nae sang again!"* 

113 



My lads, an* what am 1 to say? 
Ye shiirely ken the Muse's way: 
Yestreen, as gleg's a tyke — the day, 

Thrawn like a cuddy: 
Her conduc', that to her's a play, 

Deith to a body. 

Aft whan I sat an' made my mane, 
Aft whan I laboured burd-alane, 
Fishin' for rhymes an' fmdin' nane, 

Or nane were fit for ye — 
Ye judged me cauld's a chucky stane - 

No car'n a bit for ye ! 

But saw ye ne'er some pingein' bairn 

As weak as a pitaty-par'n' — 

Less iised wi' guidin' horse-shoe aim 

Than steerin' crowdie — 
Packed afT his lane, by moss an' cairn, 

To ca' the howdie. 

Wae's me, for the puir callant than ! 
He wambles like a poke o' bran, 
An' the lowse rein as hard's he can, 

Pu's, trem'lin' handit; 
Till, blafT! upon his hinderlan' 

Behauld him landit. 
114 



Sic-like — I awn the weary fac' — 
Whan on my muse the gate I tak, 
An' see her gleed e'e raxin' back 

To keek ahint her; — 
To me, the brig o' Heev'n gangs black 

As blackest winter. 

" Lordsake! we're aff," thinks I, "butwbaur? 
On what abhorred an' whinny scaur, 
Or whammled in what sea o' glaur, 

Will she desert me ? 
An' will she just disgrace ? or waur — 

Will she no hurt me?" 

Kittle the quaere! But at least 

The day I've backed the fashious beast, 

While she, wi' mony a spang an' reist, 

Flang heels ower bonnet; 
An' a' triumphant — for your feast, 

Hae! there's your sonnet! 



"5 



XI 
EMBRO HIE KIRK 

THE Lord Himsel' in former days 
Waled out the proper times for praise 
An' named the proper kind o' claes 

For folk to preach in : 
Preceese and in the chief o' ways 
Important teachin'. 

He ordered a' things late and air'; 
He ordered folk to stand at prayer. 
(Although I cannae just mind where 

He gave the warnin\) 
An' pit pomatum on their hair 

On Sabbath mornin'. 

The hale o' life by His commands 
Was ordered to a body's hands; 
But see! this corpus juris stands 

By a' forgotten ; 
An' God's religion in a' lands 

Is deid an' rotten. 

116 



While thus the lave o' mankind's lost, 
O' Scotland still God maks His boast - 
Puir Scotland, on whase barren coast 

A score or twa 
Auld wives wi' mutches an' a hoast 

Still keep His law. 

In Scotland, a wheen canty, plain, 
Douce, kintry-leevin' folk retain 
The Truth — or did so aince — alane 

Of a' men leevin'; 
An' noo just twa o' them remain — 

Just Begg an' Niven. 

For noo, unfaithful to the Lord 
Auld Scotland joins the rebel horde; 
Her human hymn-books on the board 

She noo displays: 
An' Embro Hie Kirk's been restored 

In popish ways. 

O pundum temporis for action 
To a' o' the reformin' faction, 
If yet, by ony act or paction, 

Thocht, word, or sermon, 
This dark an' damnable transaction 

Micht yet determine! 
117 



For see — as Doctor Begg explains — 
Hoo easy 't's dune! a pickle weans, 
Wha in the Hie Street gaither stanes 

By his instruction, 
The uncovenantit, pentit panes 

Ding to destruction. 

Up, Niven, or ower late — an' dash 
Laigh in the glaur that carnal hash; 
Let spires and pews wi' gran' stramash 

Thegether fa' ; 
The rumlin' kist o' whustles smash 
In pieces sma\ 

Noo choose ye out a waie hammer; 
About the knottit buttress clam'er; 
Alang the steep roof stoyt an' stammer, 

A gate mis-chancy; 
On the aul' spire, the bells' hie cha'mer, 

Dance your bit dancie. 

Ding, devel, dunt, destroy, an' ruin, 
Wi' carnal stanes the square bestrewin', 
Till your loud chaps frae Kyle to Fruin, 

Frae Hell to Heeven, 
Tell the guid wark that baith are doin' — 

Baith Begg an' Niven. 
118 



XII 

THE SCOTMAN'S RETURN FROM 
ABROAD 

In a letter from Mr. Thomson to Mr. Johnstone 

IN mony a foreign pairt I've been, 
An' mony an unco ferlie seen, 
Since, Mr. Johnstone, you and I 
Last walkit upon Cocklerye. 
Wi' gleg, observant een, I pass't 
By sea an' land, through East an' Wast, 
And still in ilka age an' station 
Saw naething but abomination. 
In thir uncovenantit lands 
The gangrel Scot uplifts his hands 

At lack of a' sectarian fiish'n, 
An' cauld religious destitution. 
He rins, puir man, frae place to place, 
Tries a' their graceless means o' grace, 
Preacher on preacher, kirk on kirk — 
This yin a stot an' thon a stirk — 
A bletherin' clan, no warth a preen, 
As bad as Smith of Aiberdeen ! 
119 



At last, across the weary faem, 
Frae far, outlandish pairts I came. 
On ilka side o' me I fand 
Fresh tokens o' my native land. 
Wi' whatna joy I hailed them a' — 
The hilltaps standin' raw by raw, 
The public house, the Hielan' birks, 
And a' the bonny U. P. kirks! 
But maistly thee, the bluid o' Scots, 
Frae Maidenkirk to John o' Grots, 
The king o' drinks, as I conceive it, 
Talisker, Isla, or Glenlivet! 

For after years wi' a pockmantie 

Frae Zanzibar to Alicante, 

In mony a fash and sair affliction 

I gie't as my sincere conviction — 

Of a' their foreign tricks an' pliskies, 

I maist abominate their whiskies. 

Nae doot, themsels, they ken it weel, 

An' wi' a hash o' leemon peel, 

And ice an' siccan filth, they ettle 

The stawsome kind o' goo to settle; 

Sic wersh apothecary's broos wi' 

As Scotsmen scorn to fyle their moo's wi' 

An', man, I was a blithe hame-comer 
Whan first I syndit out my rummer. 



Ye should hae seen me then, wi' care 
The less important pairts prepare; 
Syne, weel contentit wi' it a', 
Pour in the speerits wi' a jaw! 
I didnae drink, I didnae speak, — 
I only snowkit up the reek. 
I was sae pleased therin to paidle, 
I sat an' plowtered wi' my ladle. 

An* blithe was I, the morrow's morn, 
To daunder through the stookit corn, 
And after a' my strange mishanters, 
Sit doun amang my ain dissenters. 
An', man, it was a joy to me 
The pu'pit an' the pews to see, 
The pennies dirlin' in the plate, 
The elders lookin' on in state; 
An' 'mang the first, as it befell, 
Wha should I see, sir, but yoursel' ! 

I was, and I will no deny it, 
At the first glifT a hantle tryit 
To see yoursel' in sic a station — 
It seemed a doubtfu' dispensation. 
The feelin' was a mere digression ; 
For shiine I understood the session, 
An' mindin' Aiken an' M'neil, 



I wondered they had dune sae weel. 
I saw I had mysel' to blame; 
For had I but remained at hame, 
Aiblins — though no ava' deservin' 't — 
They micht hae named your humble servant. 

The kirk was filled, the door was steeked; 

Up to the pu'pit ance I keeked; 

I was mair pleased than I can tell — 

It was the minister himsel' ! 

Proud, proud was I to see his face, 

After sae lang awa' frae grace. 

Pleased as I was, I'm no deny in' 

Some maitters were not edifyin'; 

For first I fand — an' here was news! — 

Mere hymn-books cockin' in the pews — 

A humanised abomination, 

Unfit for ony congregation. 

Syne, while I still was on the tenter, 

I scunnered at the new prezentor; 

I thocht him gesterin' an' cauld — 

A sair declension frae the auld. 

Syne, as though a' the faith was wreckit, 

The prayer was not what I'd exspeckit. 

Himsel', as it appeared to me, 

Was no the man he iised to be. 



But just as I was growin' vext 
He waled a maist judeecious text, 
An', launchin' into his prelections, 
Swoopt, wi' a skirl, on a' defections. 

what a gale was on my speerit 
To hear the p'ints o' doctrine clearit 
And a' the horrors o' damnation 
Set furth wi' faithful' ministration ! 
Nae shauchlin' testimony here — 

We were a' damned, an' that was clean 

1 owned, wi' gratitude an' wonder, 
He was a pleisure to sit under. 



123 



XIII 

LATE in the nicht in bed I lay, 
The winds were at their weary play, 
An' tirlin' wa's an' skirlin' wae 

Through Heev'n they battered; — 
On-ding o' hail, on-blafT o' spray, 
The tempest blattered. 

The masoned house it dinled through; 
It dung the ship, it cowped the coo'; 
The rankit aiks it overthrew, 

Had braved a' weathers; 
The Strang sea-gleds it took an' blew 

Awa' like feathers. 

The thrawes o' fear on a' were shed, 
An' the hair rose, an' slumber fled, 
An' lichts were lit an' prayers were said 

Through a' the kintry; 
An* the cauld terror clum in bed 

Wi' a' an' sindry. 

To hear in the pit-mirk on hie 
The brangled collieshangie flie, 
124 



The waiT, they thocht, wi' land an' sea, 

Itsel' wad cowpit; 
An* for auld aim, the smashed debris 

By God be rowpit. 

Meanwhile frae far Aldeboran, 
To folks wi' talescopes in han', 
O' ships that cowpit, winds that ran, 

Nae sign was seen, 
But the wee warl' in sunshine span 

As bricht's a preen. 

I, tae, by God's especial grace, 
Dwall denty in a bieldy place, 
Wi' hosened feet, wi' shaven face, 

Wi' dacent mainners: 
A grand example to the race 

O' tautit sinners! 

The wind may blaw, the heathen rage, 
The deil may start on the rampage; — 
The sick in bed, the thief in cage — 

What's a' to me ? 
Cosh in my house, a sober sage, 

I sit an' see. 

An' whiles the bluid spangs to my bree, 
To lie sae saft, to live sae free, 

125 



While better men maun do an' die 

In unco places. 
"JVhaur's God?" I cry, an' "Whae is me 

To hae sic graces?" 

I mind the fecht the sailors keep, 
But fire or can'le, rest or sleep, 
In darkness an' the muckle deep; 

An' mind beside 
The herd that on the hills o' sheep 

Has wandered wide. 

I mind me on the hoastin' weans — 
The penny joes on causey stanes — 
The auld folk wi' the crazy banes, 

Baith auld an' puir, 
That aye maun thole the winds an'' rains, 

An' labour sair. 

An' whiles Pm kind o' pleased a blink, 
An' kind o' fleyed forby, to think, 
For a' my rowth o' meat an' drink 

An' waste o' crumb, 
I'll mebbe have to thole wi' skink 

In Kingdom Come. 
126 



For God whan jowes the Judgment bell, 
Wi' His ain Hand, His Leevin' Sel\ 
Sail ryve the guid (as Prophets tell) 

Frae them that had it; 
And in the reamin' pat o' Hell, 

The rich be scaddit. 

O Lord, if this indeed be sae, 
Let daw that sair an' happy day! 
Again' the waiT, grawn auld an' gray, 

Up wi' your aixe ! 
And let the puir enjoy their play — 

I'll thole my paiks. 



127 



XIV 
MY CONSCIENCE! 

OF a' the ills that flesh can fear, 
The loss o' frien's, the lack o' gear, 
A yowlin' tyke, a glandered mear, 

A lassie's nonsense — 
There's just ae thing I cannae bear, 
An' that's my conscience. 

Whan day (an' a' excuse) has gane, 
An' wark is dune, and duty's plain, 
An' to my chalmer a' my lane 

I creep apairt, 
My conscience! hoo the yammerin' pain 

Stends to my heart ! 

A' day wi' various ends in view 
The hairsts o' time I had to pu\ 
An' made a hash wad staw a soo, 

Let be a man ! — 
My conscience ! whan my han's were fu', 

Whaur were ye then? 
128 



An* there were a' the lures o' life, 
There pleesure skirlin' on the fife, 
There anger, wi' the hotchin' knife 

Ground shairp in Hell — 
My conscience ! — you that's like a wife! — 

Whaur was yoursel? 

I ken it fine: just waitin' here, 

To gar the evil waur appear, 

To clart the guid, confuse the clear, 

Misca' the great, 
My conscience! an' to raise a steer 

When a's ower late. 

Sic-like, some tyke grawn auld and blind, 
Whan thieves brok' through the gear to 

p'ind, 
Has lain his dozened length an' grinned 

At the disaster; 
An' the morn's mornin', wud's the wind, 

Yokes on his master. 



129 



XV 
TO DOCTOR JOHN BROWN 

{Whan the dear doctor, dear to a, 
W 'as still amang us here belaw, 
I set my pipes his praise to blaw 

Wi a' my speerit; 
But noo, Dear Doctor! he's awa\ 

An neer can hear it.) 

BY Lyne and Tyne, by Thames and Tees 
By a' the various river-Dee's, 
In Mars and Manors 'yont the seas 

Or here at hame, 
Whaure'er there's kindly folk to please, 
They ken your name. 

They ken your name, they ken your tyke, 
They ken the honey from your byke; 
But mebbe after a' your fyke, 

(The truth to tell) 
It's just your honest Rab they like, 

An' no yoursel'. 

As at the gowff, some canny play'r 
Should tee a common ba' wi' care — 
130 



Should flourish and deleever fair 
His souple shintie — 
An' the ba' rise into the air, 
A leevin' lintie: 

Sae in the game we writers play, 
There comes to some a bonny day, 
When a dear ferlie shall repay 

Their years o' strife, 
An' like you Rab, their things o' clay, 

Spreid wings o' life. 

Ye scarce deserved it, I'm afraid — 
You that had never learned the trade, 
But just some idle mornin' strayed 

Into the schiile, 
An' picked the fiddle up an' played 

Like Neil himsel'. 

Your e'e was gleg, your fingers dink; 
Ye didnae fash yourseF to think, 
But wove, as fast as puss can link, 

Your denty wab : — 
Ye stapped your pen into the ink, 

An' there was Rab ! 

Sinsyne, whaure'er your fortune lay 
By dowie den, by canty brae, 
131 



Simmer an' winter, nicht an' day, 
Rab was aye wi' ye; 
An' a' the folk on a' the way 
Were blithe to see ye. 

O sir, the gods are kind indeed, 
An' hauld ye for an honoured heid, 
That for a wee bit clarkit screed 

Sae weel reward ye, 
An' lend — puir Rabbie bein' deid — 

His ghaist to guard ye. 

For though, whaure'er yoursel' may be, 
We've just to turn an' glisk a wee, 
An' Rab at heel we're shiire to see 

Wi' gladsome caper: 
The bogle of a bogle, he — 

A ghaist o' paper! 

And as the auld-farrand hero sees 

In Hell a bogle Hercules, 

Pit there the lessen deid to please, 

While he himsel' 
Dwalls wi' the muckle gods at ease 

Far raised f rae hell : 

Sae the true Rabbie far has gane 
On kindlier business o' his ain 
13 2 



Wi' aulder frien's; an' his breist-bane 

An' stumpie tailie, 
He birstles at a new hearth stane 

By James ana Ailie. 



133 



XVI 

IT'S an owercome sooth for age an' youth 
And it brooks wi' nae denial, 
That the dearest friends are the auldest 
friends 
And the young are just on trial. 

There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld 
And it's him that has bereft me; 

For the surest friends are the auldest friends 
And the maist o' mines hae left me. 

There are kind hearts still, for friends to fill 
And fools to take and break them; 

But the nearest friends are the auldest 
friends 
And the grave's the place to seek them. 



134 



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